Author: Aaron Torpy.

Firefox is, by all accounts, a very good browser. Some would say and excellent browser. But the developers at Mozilla know it's not perfect, and that's why they've built an outstanding plugin system, which allows 3rd parties to improve upon Firefox by adding new functions and visual themes. Better still, they've made these extensions really easy to install (and uninstall, if required). The best bit? They're all small and thus quick to download (10's to 100's of kB).

On this page, I list the extensions and visual themes that my extensive research has identified to be the very best on offer. These are the ones that make a good browser better.

Firefox has a neat, functional look to it. Everything is where it should be, the buttons look nice, and … well … that's about all I can say. It's neat. Not beautiful, but neat. Opera is beautiful, Firefox is neat, and Internet Explorer is still ugly. Anyway, you can spruce up the visual display for Firefox with some of the themes available for download from the Mozilla addons site. If these ones aren't beautiful, they're certainly no more than half a beer away from it:

• Crystal dream — my present selection.
• iPox (preview)
• iFox Smooth (preview)

I would also recommend customising the toolbar, using the 'View→Toolbars→Customise' option. Switching to 'use small icons' can save a few pixels of screen-clutter, and I also think it's worth adding some useful buttons to the toolbar (eg. new tab, download manager, RSS buttons, foXpose, etc) and removing the useless one (go).

Firefox is not lacking in features by any means, but there are some parts where FF seems to lag behind the competition (notably Opera, again). However, most of these features are available to Firefox users through 3-rd party extensions, which can be installed from the Mozilla extensions page. There are thousands of these things; some are great, and some are just plain stupid. Below you will find the extensions that I've installed and not uninstalled again - i.e. the useful ones.

Undoubtedly one of the more useful extensions, SessionSaver automatically stores and recalls your tabs so that if you close and re-open Firefox, they will still be there. SessionSaver restores the last viewed tabs after crashes too. This is also good if you're installing and uninstalling extensions or themes, as Firefox must be restarted for the changes to take effect.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Reveal allows you to easily navigate between tabs by overlaying on the screen a strip of thumbnail-previews of the open tabs. This can also be used to navigate visually through the history of a tab, or the overall history of all tabs. Other niceties are included, such as a magnifying-glass on triple-click, and a thumbnail preview when hovering the mouse over the 'back' button. An excellent tutorial is provided, and runs on first start.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

This extension allows you to preview all open tabs in one window, much like the Exposé feature in OSX (thus the name). An effective way to switch between tabs. This is a feature that Opera doesn't have, somewhat surprisingly (although it's coming in Opera 9).

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Note: This extension adds much the same functionality as the page preview in Reveal, but packs a few more thumbnails on the screen and is a bit quicker.

If, like me, you cannot imagine functioning without your RSS feeds, you may have already switched to the Opera browser, which has a very nifty built-in RSS reader. Well, Sage levels the score for Firefox. Its interface is better than that of the other Firefox RSS reader extensions (eg. Wizz), and in some ways is better than that of the Opera reader. It's definitely worth trying.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

For more info on using Sage, please see my tutorial on the subject.

A painless and unobtrusive way to get regular weather updates for your local area.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Have you ever clicked on a link to an RSS feed and been confronted with a mess of XML, such as this? This extension automatically displays the RSS feed as a nice, readable format. For the purposes of comparison:

• IE6 also shows the raw XML, but IE7 (beta) does indeed render the feed nicely.
• Opera asks if you want to subscribe to the RSS feed (the best option, m'thinks).

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Reliby adds a button to the toolbar to reload all live bookmarks (a.k.a. RSS feeds).

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Use your 1Gb GMail account as on-line storage, using a nice FTP-like interface.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

This extension allows you to add bookmarks directly into sub-menus of your bookmarks menu, using an 'add bookmark here' option (just like in Opera).

Link: addons.mozilla.org

The download manager is a strange dialog box in Firefox that really seems to be a bit of an annoying afterthought. This extension allows you to set the download manager to open as a background tab page (as in Opera), or as a new browser window.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

This extension gives you the option, when opening a PDF file, to view it in the browser (as PDF or HTML), view it in your default PDF reader, or download it to disk.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

If you've got this far you've possibly already installed a whole lot of extensions. EM Menu lists all your installed extensions in the 'Tools→Extensions' menu, which makes it easier access their options pages.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

This extension allows you to shuffle and/or hide items in the Firefox status bar (at the bottom of the window). If you've got a lot of extensions loaded, like I do, this is very useful.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

This extension puts the page-loading progress-bar into the background of the address bar, which looks kind of pretty (Opera does this). This extension may not work with all visual themes.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Disable Java and JavaScript from websites for safer, faster, ad-free browsing.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Note: NoScript will also disable useful scripts from trust-worthy sites, such as those in web-applications like e-mail clients, 'Web 2.0' pages (Slashdot, etc), and just about everything with an image gallery (even this site). The good news is that you can easily unblock these scripts on a per-domain basis, meaning you can allow scripts from sites you already know and trust, while automatically blocking those from new sites that you might not trust just yet.

Translate adds a button to the toolbar that allows you to translate the viewed page to your default language using the Babelfish on-line translator.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

This extension allows you to right-click on a word and get the dictionary definition from answers.com. Don't know what an archaeopteryx is? Easy, right-click on the word, select 'Look up on answers.com', and find out straight away.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

If you visit popular pages like slashdot or digg, you will be familiar with the server-killing slashdot/diggdot effect. This extension allows you to right-click on the link and view the cached page from Google or, failing that, CoralCDN.org. Handy.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

If you're installing (and/or uninstalling) a lot of Firefox extensions and themes, you're probably praying for a nice button to restart Firefox. Ta da!

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Google's page-rank system measures the reputation/importance/authority of a site by analysing its content, which pages link to it, and various other bits of voodoo that are of interest to SEOs. It's rather good, too, as it's the only reason Google exists and is worth eleventy five squillion dollars (approximately). The Live Page Rank extension displays the page rank of the current site, so that you can quickly decide whether it is worth reading, or whether it's all just bollocks¹⁾.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

Note: You can of course get the same functionality from the Google toolbar, but that also adds quite a bit more screen-clutter.

IE Tab allows you to view a page in Firefox using the Internet Explorer rendering engine. This is most useful when dealing with old-and-broken IE-only sites, or when developing and testing good cross-browser pages. You can even set some pages to always load in IE tabs.

Link: addons.mozilla.org

View Source Chart renders the page-source in colourful nested containers so that you can easily see how a web-page is built (see screenshots). This is a great way to understand 'how someone did something'.

link: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/655/

A nifty click-and-drag interface for measuring the size of page elements in your browser. Useful for web-developers.

Link: www.kevinfreitas.net

A handy HTML validator, using the 'Tidy' validator that's built-in to Firefox (i.e. does not use external on-line validators like W3C's service).

Link: addons.mozilla.org