Switched's Essential Firefox Add-Ons Enhance Your Browsing

We make no secret about our love of Firefox. Sure it's not the newest, fastest, or prettiest browser, but its intuitive functionality and extensive array of add-ons make it far and away our favorite. One issue we've encountered when exposing our less geeky friends and family to Firefox, is that they rarely take advantage of those extensions -- really what makes the browser worth using, anyway.

There are countless add-ons out there, so we've filtered out the junk and assembled a list of the ones essential to every Switched reader. To make things even easier, we've put together a Switched collection, to which you can subscribe. That way, you'll know if we add another extension six months down the road.

The first step is to install the Add-On Collector Extension, which allows you to subscribe to existing collections, or even create your own. Once you've installed it (and restarted Firefox), go to the Tools menu and click Add-ons. The left-most tab will be Subscriptions. Here, you'll create or log into your Mozilla account, a necessity for subscribing to collections. Then navigate to Switched's Essential Add-ons and click "Add to Favorites."

The next time you check the Subscriptions tab, you'll see Switched's Essential Add-ons listed on the left-hand side and our choice of extensions on the right. From there, select each individual enhancement to view a description, and then hit the "Add to Firefox" button to install. Clicking on "Add to Firefox" brings up the Installation menu, so you'll have to navigate back to the Subscription tab in order to install the next extension. Once you've set up everything, restart Firefox and enjoy an even better browser.

What's in the collection:

Tab Mix Plus

Tab Mix Plus allows you to tweak how Firefox treats your tabs. Don't want to see the Close button? Get rid of it. Want to spread your tabs across multiple rows instead of having to scroll from left to right? Tab Mix Plus can do that too. You can make all your links open in a new tab, or lock a tab to prevent it from navigating to a different URL. It's easily one of the most powerful extensions in the Firefox stable.

Better Gmail 2

Better Gmail is actually a sub-collection of add-ons. It brings together features specifically designed for Gmail users. With it, you can: display the number of your unread e-mails within the Gmail icon; set attachment icons to reflect the file type (to visually differentiate between PowerPoint files and images, for instance); highlight rows by hovering the mouse over them; and much, more.

Ad Block Plus

Sometimes sites go too far with advertisements (e.g., a certain ad for a certain media player on a certain music site), and ruin the experience of Web browsing by cluttering a page or bringing it to a complete crawl. Ad Block Plus has a constantly updated database of advertising sources, and does its best to block their content. After installing this, the Internet will feel like a completely different (and quiet) place.

FlashBlock

While Flash has brought advanced features and tons of multimedia content to the Web, it also hosts countless security problems and browsing headaches (e.g., embedded music players that automatically start, and garish animated ads asking you to hit a monkey with a tomato). FlashBlock automatically prevents all such content from loading, and replaces it with a simple Play button. If you want to view that YouTube video, just click Play, and the dog will be sliding by on a skateboard in no time.

Fire Gestures

Contrary to popular belief, gesture-based controls -- navigation based on mouse movement -- are nothing new. In fact, Web browsers have offered that function since Opera introduced it in 2001. There are several extensions available for Firefox that add gesture support, but Fire Gestures is the best. You can customize the controls to your whims, but the defaults alone are useful enough to warrant its installation. While holding down the right mouse button, move the mouse to the left to go back one page, right to go forward, up then down to reload, and left then right to open a new tab. Who needs menus and buttons?

Delicious

There are loads of ways to save your bookmarks online and sync them between browsers, but our favorite is Delicious. After signing up for a Delicious account and installing the toolbar, you can leave the built-in Firefox bookmarking system behind. Install the toolbar on another PC and have the same bookmarks in both places, or access them from the Web site when away from your computer. As an added bonus, Delicious has social features for sharing sites with others and seeing what other people are bookmarking.

Video DownloadHelper

Video DownloadHelper detects embedded Flash videos and gives you a quick and easy way to save them to your PC. It doesn't work with all sites, but it works with most of the major ones, including YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, and iFilm. Next time Glen Beck does something really crazy, you don't have to worry about Rupert Murdoch pulling the video from YouTube before you get a chance to show all your friends. Just save it and e-mail it to everyone you know.

Personal Menu

Both Chrome and Internet Explorer have ditched the traditional menu bar for much cleaner interfaces. Sadly, Firefox still looks like it's stuck in 2006, and it takes up the screen real estate to prove it. Personal Menu replaces the traditional menu bar with a single button that you can stash to the side of the address bar, thus leaving a little more room for the Web page, itself – very helpful on a netbook.

Tags: add-ons, browsers, featuredvideo, features, firefox, top