Some time ago, I put together a list of my top Mozilla Firefox Extensions but never published it. I thought it about time to summarise what I do use, and why. Many extensions can be controversial - things like tabs and menu systems aren’t to everyone’s personal likings, but you should know that where you find something that functionally looks interesting, but don’t quite get along with, the Firefox web browser probably has something out there which you will like.

You have to be a little careful, however. As Mozilla continues to develop it’s popular browser (Version 3 is coming out soon) some less popular extensions will no longer have the development effort put into them to remain compatible (and working) with the new releases of the browser itself. So it’s always worth checking the Most Popular Extension listings you find over the net, and also the Mozilla extension site itself.

The following Extensions listed are useful for my own browsing behaviours as both a scrapbooker, who spends a lot of time on the internet browsing galleries and forums for the scrapbooking and paperarts communities, and as a blogger and semi-web developer who creates her own sites.  On top of this list are some recommended general links to go find yourself further extensions if a Firefox user. There are many more useful extensions available, in several categories, and the lists provided immediately below may show you some extra to suit your own browsing pleasures.

General Firefox Extension Links 

• Mozilla’s Firefox Extension Page itself. Select the Recommended menu item, and you will find the latest and greatest most popular extensions / addons available. The current theme seems set around visual image search functions, but a year or so ago it was around tabs in browsers (which the latest I.E. version took on).
  
• FreelanceSwitch’s 12 Essential Extensions - particularly good for web developers, although read the comments and you will find many others which I use, and some listed replacements for some of the 12 listed in the original article.
• Attari.Net’s Essential Firefox Addons - lists 28 good extensions
  
• Lifehacker’s Top 10 Firefox Extensions - obviously, ten of them.
  
• Leslie Franke com’s Mozilla Firefox Have it Your Way! list - includes plenty of top extensions, plus a link to MozillaZine’s discussion page on problematic extensions, should you strike a problem.
  

My Favourite Firefox Add-Ons

The Browsing Scrapbooker

• Download Statusbar - instead of a pop-up download window, your downloads sit as individual bars on the statusbar. You can set each type to clear from the bar after downloading also. Much less intrusive than having to constantly deal with pop-up windows which don’t close-down after use.  Particularly useful for all my digital scrapbooking stash downloads as zip files. Download managers are big news in the browser world, and although my favourite is very simple, you might like to check out some other ones, such as DownThemAll - which can configure all images, and files to be downloaded from a page, and stop and resume the downloads also.
  
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer - for all of us who browse from several PCs, here’s the solution. This addon works in the background, and synchronises all your bookmarks between PCs, and as a bonus, holds your bookmarks on an internet server database - so that you can log onto them where-ever you may be browsing from (say, an internet cafe, or a friend’s place also). Can also find this via the developer’s website at www.foxmarks.com.
• Cooliris Previews - this one is sometimes controversial, as some people find it intrusive. The add-on puts a little blue blob onto your screen where-ever a link is found. Hover over this, and a pop-up window will open showing you the linked page. Excellent for times when you are browsing community boards, and posters have links in their signatures. You can go to their blogs or linked pages without leaving the actual post or thread you are reading. You can lock the Preview window and skim across the blog, or webpage you are previewing, just like having a secondary browser open in front of you. Preview images, pages, and videos without having to click away from the original page.
  
• Kaboodle Add-on - if you have one (or many!) kaboodle lists online, you can add a Kaboodle button to your browser toolbar. There is a button to take you to Kaboodle’s home, and one to add the item you have on your browser page to your kaboodle lists. This sits as buttons (like Morning Coffee - see below) in the top menu of your browser, although you can also choose a bookmarklet form if you wish.
  
• Morning Coffee - if you’re like me, you’ll soon have a list of many websites you want to visit regularly. Going through your nicely categorised bookmarks list (it is nicely catergorised, right?!) to find each page and opening it up takes some time. Morning Coffee is one of my most favourite addons - it allows you to add your favourite pages to a list (everyday, Mondays only, or weekend days etc) and with one click in the morning (or whenever you logon) all those pages will be brought up into separate tabs for your viewing pleasure.
  
• Colorful Tabs - and if your morning coffee browsing is even half like mine, you’ll suddenly have lots of tabs open in front of you. To make these more useful, I use an add-on called Colorful Tabs, which makes each tab a different colour for selection purposes. You can get different tab add-ons, some allow different colours, different arrangements of tabs, numbered tabs, back-functions on tabs you’ve accidentally closed, and differing functions. Have a look around for one that fits your browsing requirements. Lifehacker (see the link in the General section) likes Tab Mix Plus, for all the session management and configuration functions it gives tabs in Firefox).
  
• Foxytunes - control your favourite media player from inside the browser. Listen to your music collection while you browse.
• Adblock Plus - I’m not going to link to this, but you’ll find  this on everyone’s top lists. I don’t use it however, because I find that most of the scrapbooking websites I actually browse to, do not use annoying popup adverts. With adblock plus you have to select which adverts, images and scripts you will allow on each page, and this would slow down my own browsing pleasure through the mostly minor advertising-centric sites I happen to frequent. But it might be helpful to you.
  

The Blogging (and Researching) Scrapbooker

•  Scribefire (used to be called Performancing) - this addon is a boon to my blogging life. It puts a right-click menu option available to me. On any page I am browsing through, I can open up Scribefire, and it will put in a link to that page, allow me to add to the blog entry, and tag it, and send it to be published onto my blog - all without actually having my blog editor or admin panels open. Supports most major blog platforms easily, formatting of text content, insertion of images if you wish, and configurable for more than one blog if you wish. You can save your scribefire based blog as notes also, and go back later to publish to your blog if you wish. Brilliant tool for the scrapbooking blogger.
  
• Evernote Webclipper - Evernote is a database type application (similar to MS Notes) available in a free trial, which allows you to take any kinds of notes - text files, clips from websites, images etc, into the database - excellent for newsletter articles or pages on the web, which you may want to keep hold of. The Evernote webclipper extension allows you to clip portions or entire webpages into Evernote, via a toolbar menu. Through the evernote website itself, you can also download executables which will put an Add to Evernote option into your right-click menu.
  
• Thumbstrips - this is a new extension and quite popular at the moment. It allows a thumbnail image of all of the pages you’ve visited to be shown in your history bar, as a film strip. For those who browse all over the web to find research or other materials, and then can’t remember what the page looks like from it’s history page title.
  
• Stumbleupon - There are plenty of bookmarklets available for those serious bloggers who keep large collections of bookmarks / favourites and want to share them with others. Take a look at the Linked-In extension or that for De.li.cious also. But my favourite has to be Stumbleupon - which allows you to rate any website you do browse through, into categories also. And by simply pressing the Stumble button on the tool-bar, you can be taken to any interesting sites which other SU users have rated. I have discovered so many interesting websites in this way.
  

The Web-Developing scrapbooker

Specifically for those of us who maintain and build little websites, perhaps to hold our scrapbooking galleries, blog applications, or scrap for others business sites perhaps. These are the must-have tools.

• Web Developer - a package of tools which adds tools and custom menus to Firefox.
  
• Firebug - edit HTML, CSS, and Javascript through a panel in Firefox.
  
• Aardvark - lets you highlight an element on a page, giving information on this, and even deleting the element in preparation for cleaning up the page if you, say, want to print from the page.
  

The above are full of helpful functions and tools, some of which are argued towards usefulness amongst developers. If you want some really helpful stand-alone tools just for some minor web development, particularly for bloggers have a look at the following -

• MeasureIt - this allows you to draw out a ruler to measure in pixels the size of elements on a web-page. How many times have you seen a newbie scrapbooking blogger asking how to create a banner header image for their new blogspace, only to find that you don’t know the sizes of banners currently on the site? Instead of copying a banner into Photoshop, you can now simply work out the size right from onscreen, then create a banner in the same size yourself. 
  
• Colorzilla - there are lots of colour-sampling little tools out there, and this one sits within firefox, allowing you to sample colours used on a webpage, and even paste the colour into other programmes.
  
• Window Resizer - although Web Developer (see above) comes with a similar tool, if you’re just after a tool to see what your blog might look like in 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024 and 1600×1200 resolutions, then take a look at this little tool.
  
• FireFTP - if you don’t have an FTP client (I use the free and brilliant Filezilla) thn FireFTP is on top of many lists. Use for the secure transfer of files directly.
  

For the Writer / Researcher

As I move into writing mode, it’s only fair to myself to start listing particular extensions which help me out when I have a mammoth research effort. I keep research notes in all sorts of formats, and applications - from list-tree type applications to relational databases of excerpts and images. Many remain relevant to the professional scrapbooker who needs to organise and manage their own copious lists of contact / business / articles and other data.

• Evernote webclipper - see above.
  
• Kaboodle Addons - Kaboodle users know that you can have all sorts of lists, including the import of your amazon book wishlist, if you wish.
  
• Zotero - this extension allows webclipping of research notes, full web-pages, and automatic capture of citation information (author, date, book etc) where available. All kept online in a database. 
  
• Copy Plain Text - I use a relational database application (called Literary Mind) which allows for plain text entries only. When you copy from the web, you often bring in all the formatting, including carriage-returns which upset the search facilities in my database. Copy Plain Text allows just that - to bring in only plain text without the formatting. You can use this to then format as you want into a Word document or into my literary database.
  
• Who is this Person? - highlight a person’s name, and this extension will search through Wink, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google News, Technorati, Yahoo Person Search, Spock, WikiYou, ZoomInfo, IMDB, MySpace and more…
• Search With - highlight a key word in a webpage, and in the right-click context menu you will be able to search for this word through various search services such as Wikipedia, Google, desktop searches etc.
  
• Search toolbar - Firefox comes with a loaded search toolbar at the top right, pre-populated with some top search engines to select from (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Stumbleupon…). You can add to this engine list by easily installing further search engines from the Mozilla page found here. Add search functions through BBC News, Ask.com, Technorati and YahooLive for instance.