Firefox Add-ons
Extensions
If you like functionality then you will love Firefox extensions as they are small add-ons that add new functionality to Mozilla Firefox browsers. Extensions could be anything from a small toolbar button to a completely new interactive feature. In either case they allow Firefox to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while minimizing the size of the application itself. The advantage is you can choose how you want YOUR browser to act - your in control.
There are thousands of extensions, here are our recommended top ten, try them before you say no!
- FlashGot Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page together at the maximum speed with a single click, using the most popular and reliable external download managers for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD. Supported products are dozens, see http://flashgot.net for details. FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to synthetize full media galleries in one page from serial contents scattered on several pages, for easy and fast "download all".
- NoScript Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java and other executable content only for trusted domains of your choice, e.g. your home-banking web site.
This whitelist based preemptive blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with no loss of functionality...
Experts do agree: Firefox is really safer with NoScript - Fasterfox Performance and network tweaks for Firefox.
Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.
Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with the unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing. A popup blocker for popups initiated by Flash plug-ins is also included. - Adblock Once installed, it's a snap to filter elements at their source-address.
Just right-click: Adblock: done. Filters use either the wildcard character (*)
or full Regular Expression syntax. Hit the status-element and see what has or
hasn't been blocked. - VideoDownloader Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion... and other 60+ video sites. And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc) Directly! VideoDownloader add a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. Just click that and download the video you are watching !
- DownThemAll! The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!
DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager: it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400% and it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time! DownThemAll is fast, reliable and easy-to-use! It lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want! - StumbleUpon StumbleUpon lets you "channelsurf" the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for browsing, reviewing and sharing great sites with like-minded people. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn't think to search for.
- IE Tab IE Tab - an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox. This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your webpage displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.
- Tab Mix Plus Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.
- Forecastfox Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.
Plug-ins
Firefox plug-ins are slightly different to extensions as they help your browser perform specific functions like playing multimedia files or viewing special graphic formats. Plug-ins are slightly different from extensions, which modify or add to existing functionality. In this way many new features often become so well known that Microsoft often mimic these new found plug-in ideas. Some great plug-ins have made it mainstream, here are a few of our favorites...
These are amongst the most popular add-ons for Firefox