Kerkia

Background

The Firefox browser is a great application, and it includes support for extensions. Those are 3rd party applications that any developer can implement, and they are all available for free to anybody willing to use them. They can be added to Firefox very simply, as well as managed from Firefox afterwards. Here is a list of some of our favourite extensions.

Recommendations

ColorfulTabs: this extension colours every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appeal of the interface. This is particularly useful with tons of tabs opened, and opened vertically as we often do.

Compact Menu 2 and Tiny Menu: two competing extensions that duplicate the menu bar on the toolbar as a menu of menus; a great extension if you want to remove the menu bar to gain real estate.

Download Statusbar: view and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar; improves upon the default download manager of Firefox.

Extended Statusbar:  a statusbar with speed, percentage, time and loaded size, similar to the Opera status bar (note: Opera is a great web browser which really invented many if not most of the UI concepts of modern web browsers, including speed dial, tabs browsing, mouse gestures, etc.).

Fast Dial and Speed Dial: those are two competing extensions that do the same: visually presenting your most favourites bookmarks on a home page, to make it very easy and fast to start browsing.

IE Tab: enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox, most useful when you encounter one of those few sites that really work well on IE only.

Linkification: converts test links into genuine, clickable links, most useful on those many pages that have links such as www.kerkia.com that are not hyperlinked like this: www.kerkia.com.

Meebo: the extension of the everywhere instant messenger.

Stop-or-Reload Button: simply turn the stop and reload buttons into a single one like in other browsers such as Safari (the Apple web browser).

Tree Style Tab: probably our most favourite extension and our most missed add-on on Google Chrome so far, it shows tabs like in a tree on the left side of Firefox (sidebar). This allows managing way more open tabs at the same time, including in a collapsible/extendable hierarchy.

Undo Closed Tabs Button: have you ever closed a tab by error? This extension solves that problem by adding a toolbar and/or tab bar button to undo the last tab close.

Weave and Xmaks: two competing extensions for the automatic synchronization of bookmarks as well as other things like password, tabs (Weave only), history; see our review of bookmark synchronization solutions.

Adblock Plus: remove ads from web pages; extremely useful.

FireGestures and All-in-One Gestures: these competing extensions allow you to execute common commands using mouse gestures (FireGesture), rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling. This makes browsing very fast once you’re use to using it; another great feature invented originally by the Opera web browser.

Better Gmail 2: enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.

Clear Fields: toolbar buttons that clear various fields on forms.

Download Manager Tweak: a modification of the Firefox download manager that changes its appearance and allows it to be opened in a separate window, a new tab or the sidebar.

Extension Developer: a suite of tools for extension developers.

Faviconize Tab: when you double click on it, the tab size is reduced to the icon size, very useful when viewing tabs horizontally and when you have many of those.

Fierr: replaces the error page with a more stylish appearance with additional features.

Firebug: a bunch of useful tools for web developers.

Fission: progress bar in the address bar (Safari style). Very nice.

Flagfox: displays a flag depicting the location of the the current web page server.

Forecastfox: international weather forecasts displayed in any toolbar or statusbar.

Open IT Online: allows you to open your files online without the need of any software to be installed.

Places’ Full Titles: eliminates unnecessary truncation of bookmarks’ and history items’ titles.

PlainOldFavorites: use Internet Explorer Favourites directly from Firefox, which can be useful if those are not synchronized and if you use IE as your main web browser.

Print/Print Preview: replace the default “Print” button with the Mozilla Suite style “Print/Print Preview” toolbar button/menu, with additional “Page Setup” option. Adds new options to context menu as well.

ScribeFire: a full-featured blog editor that integrates in Firefox and lets you easily post to your blog; see our article on the best blog editors.

SearhPreview: inserts web site previews in Google, Yahoo and Bing search results.

Session Manager: saves and restores the state of all windows.

URL Fixer: fixes common misspellings in URL’s entered in the address bar e.g. replaces .cmo by .com automatically.

WOT: web of trust; adds information about how trusted web sites can be, at least by users who report trust information.

Yet Another Smooth Scrolling: replaces scroll behaviour with both mouse wheel and cursor