Sara’s post inspired me to hammer out a post of my favorite Firefox extensions:

• Tabbrowser Preferences.  Adds lots of capabilities to Firefoxes tabbed browsing system.
• ForecastFox.  You can never have enough weather reports, right?
• Mouse Gestures.  This is my absolute favorite Firefox extension; it’s become second nature (to the point where I do gestures in other applications and wonder why they aren’t working…whoops!); I can’t imagine browsing without this extension.  Getting used to it takes some time, but is well worth it.
• Web Developer Toolbar.  This is probably the most popular Firefox extension out in the wild…if you don’t have it installed, run (don’t walk) and install it immediately…it’s a godsend.
• DownTHEMall!.  Allows for rapid downloading of any specified file extension from a web page to a specified directory.
• Google Pagerank Status.  Is vanity really a sin?  Maybe not, but at least you can see the pagerank of whatever site you’re visiting.
• SmoothWheel.  This extension…well, it makes scrolling in a Firefox window more “smooth”…a must have.
• Resize Search Box.  By default, you can’t resize the Google search textbox in Firefox…with this extension, you can.  A small but very well needed tweak for Firefox.
• SessionSaver.  My second favorite Firefox extension…it saves all open tabs, window position (meaning scroll bar position, history, etc) when you close Firefox…when you reopen FF everything is right where you left it.  Even if FF crashes, everything is saved…a must have.
• Focus Last Tab (scroll down a bit).  This extension puts focus to the last active tab when closing the current tab…which is how it should be.
• Netcraft Toolbar.  Displays “phishing” information about the site you’re currently visiting, and attempts to block out sites that present a phishing attack.
• Download Manager Tweak.  Adds capabilities to the built in FF download manager…and gives you the option to disable the annoying “all downloads have completed” toast popup in FF.
• ColorZilla.  Another web developer extension…this allows you to hover over any element in a webpage and get the hex color code of said element…great for tweaking CSS on sites.
• View Formatted Source.  Seeing is believing on this one…and it’s my 3rd favorite extension.  It’s on par with Visual Studio formatting for viewing the source of a webpage, and has an incredible “inline” viewing option as well…a must have if you’re a web developer.
• Google Send To Phone.  Allows you to send web snippets to any SMS enabled phone by simply highlighting the text on a webpage.  This one ranks high on the “coolness” factor.
• Colorful Tabs.  Like the name suggests, it adds colors to open tabs in Firefox…simple yet elegant.

Not an exhaustive list of all the extensions I use, but definitely the one’s I can’t live without.  Firefox has changed the way I browse the internet…going back to IE (when I don’t have a choice) makes me wonder how I got by without this type of functionality in the past. 

Anyone else have a “can’t live without this” extension for Firefox?

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