10 Top Firefox Add-Ons

Fri, Jul 24, 2009, by Stephen J. Ardent

Browsers

These are the top ten FireFox extensions, or add-ons, that you need to make surfing the web safe, enjoyable, and productive.

I like FireFox.  I like the flexibility.  I like Add-ons.  I’ve put together a list of the top Add-ons I think everyone should have.  If you have gotten these yet, by all means check them out.

Adblock Plus

Are you tired of ads?  Get rid of them with click.  Choose which ads you want to get rid of, or choose a filter to get rid of all kinds without having to think about it.  One warning though – Enabling Adblock Plus will disable some features of some pages.  Especially the ability to comment, or the ability to use any Google specialty pages.  For example, if Adblock Plus is enabled, you will not be able to see your Adsense pages even if you are logged in.  You will have to disable (easily done from a drop down menu) before you can see them.

Delicious Bookmarks

This add-on integrates Delicious, the social bookmarking site with FireFox, and provides you with the means to keep track of and sync all your Delicious bookmarks.  Use it for just your bookmarks, or share with friends, family, and the world.

Ghostery

People are tracking you, they want to know what you like, what you don’t like, and what other sites you browse.  They use scripts, web-bugs, and all kinds of widgets to do so.  Use Ghostery to find out which pages are doing this and just how many they’re using.

Image Zoom

Have you ever wished you could enlarge an image on a site to get a better look at it?  Now you can with Image Zoom.  Just hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll wheel to increase the size of the picture.

PriceDrop

Do shop on Amazon?  Do you wish sometimes you had waited because you bought something and then a week later you notice the price went down?  With PriceDrop you can track items you like and be notified if the price drops.

PrintPDF

I think this is probably the most useful add-on for FireFox yet.  Have you ever wanted to save a recipe you saw on the web, or perhaps a really good article?  With PrintPDF you can save a web page as a PDF file.  It will not however create hyperlinks in the PDF file.

Shareaholic

Are you a link sharing addict?  Need access to over sixty social bookmarking sites with the click of a button?  Make bookmarking and sharing easy with the Shareaholic add-on.  It puts one icon in your address bar and from there you can access all your favorite bookmarking and sharing sites.

TinEye Image Search

Think someone has stolen on of your photographs or images?  Add the TinEye tool to FireFox, then when you have an image you want to check, hold the cursor over the image, right click and select TinEye, and it will search to see if this image is found elsewhere on the web.  Stop copyright infringement now.

TwitterBar

What do you mean you don’t tweet?  Oh well, I guess not everyone is Twit-savvy yet.  But if you are you’ll want to add this one to FireFox.  Want to tweet what you’re doing, just click the icon in your address bar and your done.  No more going out to Twitter and copying or pasting.

XPL LinkScanner FireFox / AVG Linkscanner

This is by far the best add-on I’ve found.  As you can see however I do not provide a link.  That is because Exploit Labs has been acquired by AVG.  They have replaced the XPL link scanner with their own version.  If you can find a download link for the XPL version I can say it is a great way to protect yourself from vicious websites that try to download stuff to your computer, and it warns you before you go there.  I personally have not tried the AVG version but it appears to be almost the same.

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