My “Firefox add-ons” selection

Firefox has one big benefit: it’s support for Add-ons / Plug- ins / Themes / Extensions. Without this benefit, I simply wouldn’t use Firefox, but only Google Chrome.

I list below, the Add-ons I’m using mostly:

• AI Roboform toolbar: best way to safely keep track of your website logins, passwords, forms. Even better with it’s nice and easy synchronization to Windows Mobile PDA. the nice toolbar allows you to navigate to pages you use most and immediately login, with just 2 or 3 characters to type!
• All-in-one Gestures extension: easily navigate using your mouse (navigate using mouse movements and special mouse click combinations)
• Cooliris picture/movie viewer: great way to watch pictures from many sites (facebook, flickr, google images, youtube, …). The new beta 1.10 version has even better support for facebook.
• Delicious bookmarks: keep your bookmarks online, so you can easily find back what you liked before, everywhere, anytime. This plug-in has a nice sidebar and easy integration.
• Facebook toolbar: some extra’s for facebook
• Fetch Text URL: select some non clickable or miss-spelled url and easily open the url in a new tab.
• Flashgot: integration of Flashget (download manager) in Firefox.
• Firebug: required add-on for every web developer. Nice JavaScript debugging possibilities.
• Greasemonkey: framework to easily install scripts to customize your navigation in specific websites. Thousands of scripts are available for many well known sites. Some of the scripts I prefer:
  • JavaDoc search frame: very nice search facilities for JavaDoc pages. Find as you type support.
  • StuBru download streams: add extra links on the Studio Brussel webpages to easily download theire music webstreams.
  • IMDB pirated version: add links to IMDB pages to easily download movies, subtitles, torrents, trailers, etc.
  • YouTube Lyrics: immediately show the lyrics when watching a song movie.
  • YouTube Downloader: easily download mp4 and / or flv version of YouTube movies
  • IMDB enlarge actor pictures on hover
  • Rapidshare autowait: automatically start the rapidshare free-user timer and start the download
  • Google maps maximizer: add extra buttons to be able to maximize the Google maps
  • Test Aankoop: add pdf download link next to magazine topics for easy download
  • Surfplaza: remove adds and replace by weather image on this great start page
  • AutoPagerize: Automatically load next pages while scrolling down, to get a continues scrollable page (eg for Google results)
• IE Tab: some sites still require Internet Explorer. With this plug-in you can combine Internet Explorer within Firefox.
• NextPlease: add some keyboard and mouse shortcuts to easily navigate through sites with ‘next’ and ‘previous’ kind of links.
• SendTo: Send selected text to a text file, together with url and timestamp. SendTo v0.4 is not compatible with Firefox 3.0, but I just changed the compatibility settings in the plug-in and it still works very well now. I use this plugin a lot to always keep a text file with some information on applications I download. I download a lot of software and want to be able to easily retrieve what I’ve downloaded before or get some basic information on the tool. I made an UltraEdit macro to copy the text from the sendto file into a new file, this way I can even retrieve all I need even faster in the format I prefer. All files (SendTo v0.4 for FF 3, batch file to start ultra edit with macro, UltraEdit macro) can be downloaded here.
• Tab Mix Plus: add extra options and extra functionality for the tabs in Firefox. For example duplicate current tab, open tab on mouse hover, show tab close button on mouse hover, etc.
• WebDeveloper: required add-on for every web developer. See and change many site settings, form settings, CSS settings, javascripts etc.
• Vista-aero theme: just a nice look and feel, copied from Internet Explorer.

Once Google Chrome will support all this functionality I’ll dump Firefox and will finally get my 400MB stolen memory back.

UPDATE 05/10/2009: added links to my own Greasemonkey scripts

UPDATE 01/06/2010: added AutoPagerize Greasemonkey link