Srikanth's Favorite Firefox Add-ons

After Google Chrome came out, I haven't been using Firefox a lot. And it's for a very simple reason: speed. Especially the start-up speed. I'm a speed freak and I don't like to keep my browsers opened when I'm working. I'd like to open, search for whatever I was looking for and close the damn window as soon as possible and get back to work. I came to know that Minefield is very fast, but for some reason I like Chrome for quick searching. But on weekends I do full-time browsing. And for that, I use Firefox because I miss one thing in Chrome: add-ons.

I've a few favorite Firefox add-ons and I'm finding browsing irritating and difficult without them in Chrome. These are the my favorites. These may not be in your favorites-list, but hey, I'm me and you're you.

Adblock

Ads can be very annoying, especially when they're embedded in the middle of the contents. Adblock Plus is a must-have plugin if you don't want to see those shining ads that distract you.

Flashblock

This is my next favorite add-on. Flash can consume a lot of bandwidth and slow down the rendering of the other page elements. I find it better to block those flash contents when the page loads and then play it if necessary.

Firebug

I'm not a web-developer, still I find this add-on extremely useful. A couple of my usages are:

• Tweaking any page and removing unwanted elements before printing
• Learning CSS and HTML (a better way to view the source)

When I take printouts, I'd like to have the fonts set to my favorite ones. I love to read if the fonts happen to please my eye. Firebug provides me the easy way to change the fonts used by the web-page to whatever I like. And it can also remove the unwanted elements from the page. If you haven't tried Firebug, it's high time you do it.

Menu Editor

Chrome and Firefox place "Open Link in New Tab" menu item at different positions in their context menus. And "Open Link in New Window" is something I never use. Menu Editor add-on helps me customize my Firefox menus (Duh!). I remove all the useless links (useless to me) like Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh, etc. And this add-on also helps me in having the "Open Link in New Tab" menu item's position at the same place in both the browsers I use.

Direct Link

I love this add-on. You can select text, right-click to open it as a link in a new tab (if it's a URL), or as an article in Wikipedia or to do an I'm Feeling Lucky Google search.

Paste to Tab and Go

Unfortunately, Paste and Go add-on is not available for Firefox 3. So the next best thing I could find was this one. I realized this is extremely useful when I started using Chrome. It felt stupid to paste the URL and then click on the Go button to start loading.

IE Tab

Useful when that stupid government site refuses to load in any browser other than IE.

Greasemonkey

People love this but for some reason, I rarely use it. I have "Textarea Resize" script installed but even that I've only used it a very few times. I think this feature (Textarea Resize) should be an out of the box feature in Firefox. Anyway, I like that monkey in its icon but I'm gonna remove this now. Do you think I'm missing some amazing script? Please leave your suggestion in the comments if I'm doing so.

I also have "Customize Google" installed but most of what it does is already incorporated as out of the box features, but I'll let it stay. Some other minor tweaks I do and I don't are:

• Disable plugins like Acrobat Reader, Google Update
  
• No themes, just the default
• Monospace font as Consolas (I love Consolas)
  

So, what's your favorite add-on and why? What are the tweakings you do after installing Firefox?