I can’t tell you enough how much firefox has improved my life. Not only is it 10000 times better than Internet Explorer just on its own, but the thousands add-ons you can install make life so much easier! You can find an add-on for just about anything you could ever want from your browser, but here is a list of my top 10 favorite Firefox webby add-ons:
1. Read it later: this add-on lets you… well… read it later. Its a bookmarking tool that lets you save a page in a list so you can read it at your convenience and then take it off your list when you are done. Its much more efficient than regular bookmarking, and if you are an avid web browser, you NEED this add-on!
2. ColorZilla: lets you use a dropper tool from your browser to find out the RGB and hex color of any color on a web page. Really great for designers of any kind, but especially web designers!
3. MeasureIt: lets you measure a space in your browser window in pixels. Really great for finding out the size of a web page or image. Perfect for web designers and programmers.
4. FireFTP: a fully featured FTP client built into your firefox browser. Stores all of your FTP accounts for easy access through your web browser. I can’t say enough about how great FireFTP is!
5. Download Statusbar: instead of getting a pop up window for every download, they all appear in your status bar. Makes downloading files a lot cleaner, and its fully customizable, so you can tell it where to save all of your files, what data to show, etc.
6. Drag & Drop.io: if you haven’t used drop.io yet, you need to check it out! Its a file sharing service that is free up to 100 MB. You upload your files, it gives you a special link to send to your client or whoever you are sharing files with, and they can easily download your files from this link. It has a ton of other features as well such as password protection, chat, etc. This add-on lets you automatically create a drop from within your browser.
7. Google Toolbar for Firefox: need I say more. All of google’s stuff right at your fingertips. Highly customizable as well.
8. FoxyProxy: for anyone who wants to browse the internet anonymously, or browse from a different location (i.e. for location restricted web content).
9. Google Analytics Watcher: If you’re obsessed with the SEO of your website, this lets you constantly track the google analytics reports of your website straight from your browser!
10. Screengrab: Great for web designers who want to show off their portfolio. Not all web pages fit in the browser vertically, but this add-on allows you to save the entire page as an image.
There are thousands of add-ons out there for firefox, so I encourage everyone to browse through Firefox add-ons site here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
You may find some great productivity, social networking, blogging, and general browsing tools that you never knew existed.