Firefox addons, and why they're great (Part 1)

This is a list of my favourite Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox, as promised in the last blog! These are pretty much alphabetical order, and obviously some are far, far more usefull than others.

Note, when I originally wrote this blog, it was too long for a single blog post, so I have decided to split it up into two, more manageable parts. Enjoy!

Adblock Plus

This is a great little tool that just removes adds from every website, and gives you the option to disable each add, on an add-by-add basis. You don't really know how many adds there are randomly scattered through web-pages you often visit, untill you've browsed them for a while with Adblock on, and then have to browse them again without it. All of those annoying noise-making adds on bebo? Gone. Google adds? Gone.

Cooliris

This is a great addon, which gives you an infinate, scrollable wall of either photos or videos. It's advantages become clear when you realise that it can be used on websites like bebo, to browse through entire albums in seconds, instead of loading each picture individually, and youtube, to browse hundreds of videos in moments, instead of waiting for the usual 10-per-page limit.

CoolPreviews

Made by the same people who brought us Cooliris, this handy addon gives us the option to hover over a link, and display it in a temporary window, so we can quickly decide if it's what we are looking for or not, without leaving the page we're currently on, or changing tabs.

Download Statusbar

This nice little addon which simply moves your download queue from a floating window, which can be hard to monitor, down into the bottom toolbar in firefox. It's mostly just a visual change, but it makes suprisingly big difference.

Firebug

Want to see exactly how a certain bit of javascript or html works? Just highlight it and right click "Inspect Element" and firebug brings up the exact part of the source code which refers to the element in question. Very handy.

FlashGot

This is a download manager, which has a huge array of usefull functions. Among them is a "download all" feature, handy for downloading entire directories of files. It's also able to download entire youtube videos, which can then be converted into Mp3s for your ipod! It also has the ability to 'divide' up a file, into multiple parts, and download each part simultaneously, which is a way to get around certain servers bandwith limitations on downloads per person, and also it's just much, much faster. Especially for big files such as videos or music.


Well, that's all for this post! I will be posting the second half some time next week!