Are you browsing with Firefox yet, or do you hear nothing that I say? Well, aside from you IE people still living in the past, the rest of you smart folks are surely are enjoying Firefox and it’s smooth flavor.

But let me ask you this- how many of you are rocking the Firefox Add-ons, better known as extensions? For you n00bs on such matters, extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Mozilla applications. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature.

If extensions are new to you, it’s time to have a little fun with your browser. If you’re already old school on extensions, allow me to share what I’m using and ask you to share some of the cool things you have running too. Right now, my extensions are looking like this:

HTML Validator, ColorZilla, Web Developer, View Source Chart, X-Ray and View Formatted Source are all tools I use as Web Developer by trade- I’m not sure I could live without them happily at this point, but I bet you could.

For you normal wankers, you might enjoy:

• DownThemAll! - this one lets download a whole bunch of things off a page at once- great for those music blogs, galleries you want to steal, or what have you.
• Feedview - this handsome little gem changes how RSS formats spit out in the browser- so instead of seeing a whole bunch of code-y jibber jabber when you click on an XML/RSS feed, you actually get a cute looking render. Kinda nice from time to time- some people even use it as a mock-aggregator. (N00bs: if you’re lost, don’t forget to read up on RSS feeds. It’s only been on my main page for months.)
• Fasterfox - they claim it speeds up your surfing by pre-caching anticipated link clicks. I don’t know if it’s true or not, because I have of course hacked my Firefox for speed, but it doesn’t hurt to have this one running.
• BetterSearch - pictures! Yay! This extension adds pics to your google searches and del.icio.us lists, among other things. A little preview before you click. I’m rather fond of it.
• del.icio.us post - Quick and easy- if you use del.icio.us, you need to have this. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, there’s no need to explain it to you.
• Sage - how many times do I need to talk to you about RSS!? This one is simple RSS feed reader that works right in Firefox. For my reading pleasure, I only use this extension and Thunderbird.
• IE Tab - You’re way behind of you didn’t know about tabs in Firefox- you know, the thing IE7 is trying to do now- in any case, this will convert a tab to act like IE instead of Firefox. You know, for all that non-standard crap Microsoft enjoys shatting all over its HTML documents.

There are a few others for blocking ads and the weather, but I’m not sure what I would recommend. Perhaps some of you could recommend some cool things to me? Comments about these? Raise your voice!

Filed under: Geek