Essential Firefox Add-ons

Firefox is a great web browser platform, and there are several add-ons that I think are essential. I’ll keep this page updated with new add-ons / plugins that are essential and universal. If you know of any that I am missing, tell me about them.

Ads and Flash Ads

There are two add-ons that complement each other perfectly for blocking all sorts of ads. These are:

Adblock Plus : the ad blocker

Adblock Filterset.G Updater : the add-on that automatically updates Adblock’s black-list.

And for flash ads,

Flashblock : blocks Flash ads. Flashblock is great because you can add an entire site to the approved sites white-list, or simply click on the “play” button to allow a Flash widget to load.

Bookmarks

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer : synchronizes your bookmarks folder among several computers, and also serves as a backup for your bookmarks. The only quirk right now is that the mini bookmark icons are not stored in the backup server, but this is not an issue if you are just synchronizing new bookmarks. Foxmarks synchronizes automatically.

del.ici.ous : the classic official del.icio.us extension. This classic one does not conflict with the Foxmarks or Google Broswer Sync add-on, but the new, fancy del.ici.ous add-on currently does.

I use both del.ici.ous and the standard Firefox bookmarks together; del.ici.ous is great for tagging and archiving interesting sites, and standard bookmarks are great for frequently visited sites. Creating separate folders inside Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar Folder for categories like News, Blogs, Misc is a great way to keep things organized and within easy reach.

Productivity and Miscellaneous

Auto Copy : automatically copies highlighted text to the clipboard.

Google Notebook : take notes.

IE Tab : view a page with the MS Internet Explorer engine in a Firefox tab.

LastTab : LastTab modifies Ctrl-Tab to switch to recently selected tabs, rather than always going from left-to-right. Also has an optional preview of each tab’s contents. Sort of like Windows Alt-Tab functionality for Firefox.