10 Firefox Extensions That I Can’t Live Without

Firefox is the best browser available.  It is easy to use, pretty fast response time, has tabbed browsing, rarely crashes, and the extensions capability is fantastic.  I thought that my list of favorite extensions would make for a good topic. 

  • Firebug – A great way to debug JavaScript, view the HTML source of the page, examine the page’s CSS, step through the page’s scripts, navigate through the DOM, and view all the HTTP requests the page has made.  Invaluable for any web developer.
  • HTML Validator – “A Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.”  Great to easily see if there are any HTML validation errors, and what they are.
  • Page Validator – “Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab.”
  • IE Tab – “Easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.”
  • User Agent Switcher – “Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.”  This is great for testing any user agent specific code for your site (for web analytics purposes, for example), i.e. spider filtering, crawler filtering, etc.
  • Download Statusbar – Similar to the built in download statusbar, but is only visible when necessary, and is extremely compact along the bottom of the window. 
  • PlainOldFavorites – “Use Internet Explorer Favorites directly from Firefox. No need to import, export or synchronize – the same Favorites appear everywhere.”
  • del.icio.us Bookmarks – “This extension seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web.”
  • Smart Digg Button – Uses the Digg API to determine if the current web page has been submitted to Digg.  If it has, it displays the current number of Diggs of the page. Click, and it takes you to the submission. If there are no Diggs, clicking takes you to the submission form.
  • StumbleUpon – “StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.”

One of the other cool features built into Firefox is the ability to apply skins, which change the look of your browser.  Here is a list of my favorite skins:

  • Classic Compact – “A very compact version of Firefox’s default theme, which minimizes vertical space consumed by menu, tool, tab, find and status bars as much as possible without hurting overall appearance.”
  • Vista-aero – “The most IE7-like theme with Vista Aero style! Clear and cool! Based on myFirefox themes.”  Just in case you miss your Internet Explorer 7.

So what are your favorite Firefox extensions?  What do you think of Firefox in general?  I figure that between Firefox the Browser Wars winner and this list of my favorite Firefox extensions, I should get lots of comments.

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