I’m a compulsive tweaker so I love Firefox’s wonderful hackability. I could easily spend days (and have) playing round with Firefox hacks. This is basically a working list of the Firefox hacks I love or am trying out. You can also check out Lifehacker’s Top 10.
And sorry if this page makes absolutely no sense…
Absolutely Can’t-Live-Without Firefox Add-ons
English (British) or English (Australian) - It irritates me no end being told by my browser that words like “organise” and “favourite” are misspellings. So this is one of the first things I install. Install it from Mozilla’s list of dictionaries.
Google’s Toolbar or GButts – I love Google’s new toolbar now that it’s really customisable. You can add/remove buttons under “Options” or download new ones from the Google website. Best bit is that you can drag stuff from the other toolbars onto it so you can save some toolbar real estate. Right click on the toolbar and click “customise”. I reorganise the Google Toolbar buttons to group common tasks together and I pull the bookmarks folder on to the Google Toolbar instead of having a separate Bookmarks toolbar… If that all sounds like overkill, GButts just puts simple clickable icons of your choice of Google services on your toolbar – very simple and very customisable.
CopyAllURLS - This is invaluable if, like me, you have a habit of opening too many browser windows and not having enough time to go through them all. Once installed, right-click “customise” and drag the CopyAllURLs button to the toolbar (I put it near my navigation buttons). It lets you copy the urls of all opened tabs to paste in a text file or email etc for later. Later you can highlight all the links and “paste” it back into Firefox – it will very nicely open each link in a separate tab. If you have ScribeFire (below) installed, then you can save these links as a note.
Better GCal – A collection of GreaseMonkey scripts which make Google Calendar better. Will do things like let you colour weekends in month view, text wrap long event titles and show week numbers.
GreaseMonkey – Lets you run some wonderful user created scripts. (WARNING: be sure that the script is from a trustworthy source – there have been reports of malicious ones being released). A search of “Greasemonkey” on Lifehacker will bring up plenty of choices. My current installed scripts: Google Reader Search (adds search bar to google reader which you’d think would have been a no brainer); Auto add Feed to Google Reader (bypasses stupid add to homepage redirect); Facebook Sharer + Google Reader (allows a Share to Facebook straight from Google Reader); Google Reader All Starred (I think this gets the links from all your starred options – don’t use it). If I go with Google Gears, this improved Google Reader Search looks cool.
URL Link – A little add-on that reduces the irritation of finding website addresses that aren’t hyperlinked. You can just select the text and right-click to bring up choices of “open selected url in new tab” or just “open selected url”. It also is quite customisable through its Options (Prob won’t make sense unless you install it, but I added “*.com” as an entry so that domain.com could be opened up – otherwise it would only open www.domain.com). You can find betas at the developer’s website.
ScribeFire
- A blogging must have. Lets you post to multiple blogs within your
browser, edit recent posts, change tags. It also has a handy note
saving feature. It’s really easy to use and works with most of all the popular blogs so is for anyone who blogs or is interested in blogging.
Really Like These
Favicon Picker 2 - Lets you choose your own favicons for your bookmarks. You can often find a site’s favicon by going to www.domain.com/favicon.ico (obviously replace domain.com with the site’s name). If not you can always use a small graphic – save it as a gif or bmp and rename it with a “.ico” on the end. Should do the trick. There are also some free icon makers around that you can use. Right click on the bookmark and select “properties”, you should now have an icon option. While you are there you can delete the bookmark’s name so only the icon shows up.
GMarks – I’m trying out the whole online bookmarking thing and haven’t committed to a service as yet, but it looks like I will use Google Bookmarks for something – even if it’s just a backup. In any case, GMarks makes organising and accessing those bookmarks sooooo much easier. I’m actually appalled how bad Google Bookmarks and Del.icio.us are in that respect.
Google Notebook – Neat little clipping service, the add-on lets you access a menu from your status bar. All your clippings can be exported to Google Docs/spreadsheets. Wish it had an email to/blog to function, hopefully someday.
IE Tab – Let’s you open Internet Explorer in Firefox which is really really handy for those sites which insist that you use Microsoft’s browser.
Essential Web/Blog Development Add-ons (thought I’d separate these out)
FireFTP – Mime Cuvalo has created this great donationware FTP client that runs right in the Firefox browser and it works like a charm!
View Source Chart – Makes viewing source code much easier, I mean really much easier (puts the tags into separate coloured boxes).
Web Developer – Lots of nifty tools to help you tinker with websites.
ColorZilla – Finding out any colour on a webpage with the eye-dropper is the most useful tool but there are more “colourful goodies” including a Page Zoomer.
Worth having a look at
Stylish - Does a GreaseMonkey (above) on CSS – ie lets you use user created stylesheets to make sites better. I haven’t actually liked any of the alternative stylesheets I’ve tried out so it’s not yet on my essential list. An example: roughunderbelly style for Todoist.
iMacros - Free at this stage for firefox and lets you create all sorts of super efficient macros.
Faviconize Tab – This nifty add-on gives you a right-click option to “faviconize” any tab – ie reduce the width to only show the favicon. Great if you have lots of browser windows open a lot (who me?).
Del.ici.ous Add-ons – Delicious Complete is a bit slow but makes it really easy to tag links with either your own tags or the most popular tags others have chosen for the site. A bit of a stitch in time saves nine. There’s also the official Del.icio.us Bookmarks and this isn’t actually an add-on but a bookmarklet – Quick Tagging Del.icio.us.
Todoist Add-ons – Todoist is a really elegant online task manager that I’m currently loving! Some nice hacks for it include the Todoist Status Bar (will install straight from this link, so only click on it if you know you want it – you need to put in a web key once installed. Get this from your Todoist Preferences page under “account”). One of the coolest features is the ability to turn Gmail emails into tasks – if you install this Firefox plugin, delegatetotodoist.
Better GReader – I don’t like these tweaks much but I think it’s just taste!
Wordpress.com Sidebar – “Get quick access to your wordpress.com account from your browser sidebar.” Don’t really have a wordpress.com blog (except for work) so it’s not really that useful for me.
DownloadThemAll! – Makes your downloading easier. For supercharged tricks, check out the tips at Lifehacker.
Currently Trying Out
None!
Might Try Out
Read Easily – “Fast page style switcher. It adds toolbar button, context menu item and hotkey to disable/enable styles on web pages. If you don’t like acid style looking web pages, dark backgrounds, tiny fonts, then this extension is for you.”
Pennypacker – “This extension adds functionality to tag, favorite and comment on your favourite Penny Arcade strips.”
Screengrab – “It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.”
iWEBTOOL Webmaster’s Toolbar – Gives you a button on your status bar to a whole heap of tools from the iwebtools website to help you analyse your website (or others’).
CustomizeGoogle – “CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhance Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).”
2 pane bookmarks – “This splits the Bookmarks Sidebar panel with 2 panes. When you choose a folder from the above tree, the contents will be shown in the below pane.”
Auto-Copy – “Select text and it’s automaticaly copied to the clipboard.”
StumbleUpon Toolbar – “StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web.
It is a collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites.” Haven’t really gotten into StumbleUpon (sigh… it’s another thing).
