The Best Firefox Plugins and Extensions

Firefox is a great web browser. If nothing else, the large number of
people switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox convinced Microsoft
to finally update IE. When Firefox added inline spell checking with
version 2.0 they boosted the writing quality of every blogger, wiki
contributor, and forum post on the Internet. What more can you ask for?

Actually, the best thing about Firefox is its extensibility. Anyone
with some programming skill and some free time can add features and
functionality by building plugins and extensions. There are well over 2000 extensions listed at Mozilla.org, so where do you start? You can find a lot of “top 10″ lists around the web, but I thought I’d add my two cents as well. Here is a list of some of the best Firefox extensions.

1. Adblock Plus
- Adblock is a controversial choice because it allows users to block
out the advertisements that many websites rely on for income. This
website, for example. But again and again I find myself thanking the
Flying Spaghetti Monster for Adblock. Some sites fill their pages with
flash-based ads that flash, flutter, crawl across the pages, etc. And
those are the ads I inevitably block.

2. StumbleUpon
- StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the web. Click on the Stumble
button and you’ll get a new web site - give it a thumbs-up or a
thumbs-down and StumbleUpon will suggest sites more to your liking. I
should warn you, though, that this extension is very addictive and a
terrible time-waster.

3. Procrastato
- Now that I’ve ruined your productivity with StumbleUpon, I’ll give
you a little bit back. Procrastato watches for notorious time-wasting
sites like Digg, MySapce, and YouTube and reminds you every few minutes
to get back to work.

4. Firebug - If you are a web developer
and you don’t use some combination of these next four plugins, you
might as well be writing code blindfolded. Firebug lets you inspect
pages to find troublesome elements and edit HTML, CSS, and javascript
inline.

5. Web Developer
- The Web Developer Toolbar isn’t quite as powerful as Firebug but it
has some nice features that are easy to get to in a pinch. For example
you can resize the browser window to make sure your site still works in
800×600. You can also kill all CSS styles, which actually make MySpace
tolerable.

6. Tamper Data
- If you ever run into a tricky HTTP header problem, or want to see
what all is taking so long to load on a site, Tamper Data is the tool
for you.

7. User Agent Switcher
- You don’t need to be a web developer to appreciate this add-on. There
are still a lot of sites out there with buggy old code that tries to
look for a certain version of IE and locks you out otherwise. Use User
Agent Switcher to tell the site that Firefox is IE, and 99 times out of
100 everything runs perfectly well.

8. del.icio.us Bookmarks
- I don’t know about you but I have been building my bookmarks lists
for 10 years, exporting and importing from one browser version to the
next. The list is now way too large to be usable, but del.icio.us makes my bookmarks taggable and searchable. This plugin integrates them back into the browser.

9. SiteAdvisor
- I was a little worried when SiteAdvisor was bought by McAffee, since
I’m not a huge fan of their anti-virus suite. But SiteAdvisor remains
an absolutely necessary tool on the wild web. When you do a Google
search, you’ll see little green checkmarks next to well-behaved sites
and red X’s next to spammers and spyware purveyors. Go install this on
your mom and dad’s computers today.