The best Firefox Add-ons…

Firefox has about 2,340,945,583,492,044,372,847 advantages over every other browser out there. Not the least of which is the ability to create add-ons and extensions for highly specific functionality. Here’s my list of add-ons that I find myself using frequently.

1. Reload Every - This one is incredibly simple, and useful. Install it, and you’ll have the option of right clicking any page, and setting the timer for refresh intervals. Let’s say you’ve got a script that crawls your database to grab records touching multiple tabls, and cleans them up, reporting on the outcome. If you want to see the report at every interval, but want the option of letting this script “run” in the background, you could set it to LIMIT 1 in your SQL query, and then reload every 5 seconds. Admittedly, this would be a bit more elegant with an AJAX functionality that does the same, but why overwork on a cleanup script when you can install this, and spend your real energy working on the front end? Just install it, and you’ll start to see my point. (PS. you could also start using scripts like this to build up page loads on site that “rank” such activity… say, myspace?)
2. Web Developer - If you’re not using this plugin, your life is far too hard. I guarantee it.
3. Stumble Upon - I have no particular reason to endorse this company, but I do… strongly. I just really like the way they’ve done things so far, and releasing a firefox extension that simply helps the experience of using their site without actually offering them more page views is a great example of why.
4. FaviconizeTab - Adds the benefit of optimizing your tab bar with tiny icons instead of full-sized tabs. Very useful.
5. Firebug - A ‘must-have’ for JavaScript / AJAX development.

… and the extensions I wish weren’t so buggy.

• PermaTabs - This is a great idea, but when you use gmail as a permatab, for example, you constantly have new tabs opening with the same content. It’s annoying. So much so that I didn’t want to frustrate myself with duplicating it to describe it better here.
• Fasterfox - A WaxJelly reader commented about Fasterfox and I’ve been using it ever since. It allows you to prefetch links and store them as cache, and enhance the already existing cache system Firefox uses. Very quick, however CSS/XHTML developers might not enjoy it as much seeing as CSS gets cached.