Foxkei

GlassAdam suggested that I do a blog on Firefox add-ons, so here it goes. Statistics show that most of you are using Mozilla Firefox anyway, so most of you may find this blog interesting.

Just a heads up, you can click on these images to see a larger version (800*483), but I also added “original size” which is 1440*900. Clicking on original size will open a new window/

:: Adblock Plus ::

We have all seen flashy, annoying ads ranging from the damn buzzing bees to classmates dot com. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could block these ads? This is where Adblock Plus comes in. All you have to do is install this extension, restart your Firefox and choose a source for blocked ads. And that’s that. Websites make money thanks to ads, but users have to click on them in order for the site to make money, so some people have a problem with this plugin because of the fact that it blocks those ads and defeats the purpose of having advertisement in one’s site in the first place.

Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.

:: Menu Editor ::

Right-click on the page and see how many menu-items you see. If you have already installed other plugins, you might have a longer menu. Items keep adding on, but the reality is you don’t use most of them. Menu Editor is great plugin that allows you to add, remove, rearrange and organize these items. No more looking through all the list just to find “Save Image As…”.

Rearrange or remove menu-items from the main context menu (right-click menu) and main menu-bar (File Edit View etc.)

:: Password Exporter ::

Don’t know about you, but I like to backup my bookmarks every now and then in case something goes wrong with my PC and I have to re-install Windows again~ Importing and exporting bookmarks is already part of Firefox, but what about saved passwords? For that, you’ll need Password Exporter. It allows you to export your saved password along with the corresponding username and sites as an XML or CSV file. And just to be safe, there is and encryption option while you’re exporting. And don’t let the name fool you, this plugin also allows you to import those passwords you exported.

This extension allows you to export your saved passwords and disabled login hosts using XML or CSV files that can be imported in another browser or computer.

:: Screengrab! ::

Screen-capturing long pages is a pain without Screengrab! Before using this plugin, I had to screencap portions of the page and Photoshop them together. Something that took me ten minutes can now be done in two seconds. This is an extremely useful add-on. The images are saved as PNG with great quality. The file size can go up depending on the length of the page, but you can always convert your image to JPG if that happens.

It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves web pages as images.

:: Web Developer ::

This add-on is for the web developers (hence the name!). Web Developer gives you various tools to analyze a given website. You can look at the CSS, meta tags, outline frames, cookies, DOM inspector, etc. It has a lot of options, half of which I haven’t even tried. Highly useful plugin if you’re into web designs and such. You can access these tools via the toolbar, or if you prefer, you can disable that toolbar and use the options via right-clicking on the page.

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

:: Ctrl Tab Preview ::

For those who don’t know, in Firefox, Ctrl + Tab switches your tab to the next one. It’s like Alt + Tab behavior in Windows. Ctrl Tab Preview plugin adds a preview thumbnail of your pages, so you can go through them faster. Very useful if you open everything in a new tab like me.

Instead of directly changing tab it works some thing like Alt+Tab on windows. It views preview of the tab and you can change directly to the tab you want to or just go through all tabs to see what you got in them.

That’s it for part one. I’ll introduce more plugins in later blogs. Make sure to let me know which ones you found interesting and installed.

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