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)
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)
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8 comments:
I use lots of firefox add-ons. That is one other reason why I would like to stick with it.
Here the list goes that I use at home. At office I use a LOT, so can't write them here:
* Vimperator
* TwitterFox
* TwitterBar
* Share Video
* ScribeFire
* Pronounce
* PicLens
* MultiSidebar
* Google Notebook
* Google Gears
* Gmail Notifier
* FoxClocks
* Firefly
* Extension List Dumper
* DownThemAll!
* Download Statusbar
* DNA
* DashBlog
* Compact Menu 2
* ColorfulTabs
* Better GReader
* Better Gmail 2
* Adblock Plus
These were a set of good ones, I too did not use google chrome for some reasons, like I couldnt see some frames in the browser. But it has real fast start up. And the the used thumbnails was good, I need not again type the url or bookmark them. But for the same in fire fox I use
Fast dial:blank tabs with a panel of thumbnails of your favorite sites
And one more cool one:
ReminderFox:ReminderFox makes sure you remember all of your important dates via easy-to-use lists, alerts, and alarm notifications.
Hi Arun,
Wow, you've got some list over there. Vimperator looks very interesting indeed. I'll have a go at it. I've heard good things about DownThemAll, I use FlashGet and I'm very happy with it but I'll give this a shot once.
I used Download Statusbar but dropped it; somehow I found that more annoying than the "Downloads" window. I started using "Ctrl + J" to show or dismiss the window quickly; handy shortcut.
The only disadvantage with many add-ons installed is it slows your start-up speed a lot. We'll have to see how Chrome starts up when it starts supporting add-ons. Thanks for sharing.
Hi techmaddy, thanks for dropping by.
Yes, not all sites are guaranteed to work with Chrome. At least, developers are caring about Firefox and not just IE.
I also used FastDial once, but dropped it. I think the address bar (or the awesome bar) of Firefox is brilliant. It can also work as "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search. Very useful when you start using it.
Chrome is super fast and its my primary browser now. I'm sure developers are working on new add ons.We have grease metal in chrome which is similar to grease monkey in Firefox.
Check this http://greasemetal.31tools.com/
csr, thanks for that. I'll try Greasemetal; heard of this one. Google is adding support for an extension system to Chrome. As ironic as it may sound, their first demo extension may be an AdBlocker!
This is the design document for Chrome Extensions:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions.
all these extensions make ff different from other browsers; I loved them. Working on web without ff extns is a bit pain for me. Nice post.
// Jadu, unstableme.blogspot.com
Yes Jadu, working on web-development front-end without Firebug is very painful. I used Firebug extensively when I was automating some GUI test cases using Selenium.
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