Lifehacker has asked the important question "How many Firefox extensions do you have?", so I figured I'd list them here, along with a small explanation.
- Adblock Plus : I hadn't bothered with an ad blocker for quite some time, but now that I've been running linux-firefox, which enables Flash, I just had to add it. I find blinking, flashing, jumping ads to be far too invasive for me, and this seems to do the job and kills them good.
- Auto Copy : this extension automatically adds selected text to the clipboard. Every now and then it can be a nuisance, but given that 95% of the time the reason you are selecting text is so that you can hit Ctrl-C to copy it, it just Makes Sense.
- Colorful Tabs : for some primary reason, this is my favorite extension. It merely gives each tab its own color. Very nice eyecandy.
- Copy Plain Text : Gives you the option to not bring along any formatting when you copy text. You can even tell Auto Copy to use it.
- CustomizeGoogle : Adds lots of cool filtering features to Google searches, including most especially removing all the annoying ads. But there's lots of other little tweaks it does that make it worthwhile too, like adding links to other search sites. Not as important with Adblock, but still a useful extension.
- DOM Inspector : A tool to inspect the layout and objects on a web page.
- Download Statusbar : A small tool that adds a panel to the bottom of your page when you are downloading something, instead of the download window. I can't say as I've been wildly impressed with this. I don't like the fact you can't make it go away, and it tends to get stuck showing 99% done. I've removed it from some of my Firefox installations and will probably do so here too.
- Fasterfox : An extension that speeds web page downloads. I haven't done any extensive testing to see if it really does, but it seems to work okay.
- FireFTP : A tool that adds a pretty reasonable drag 'n' drop FTP client right in Firefox. It can be a little slow building lists of 100s of files, but it does a pretty good job nonetheless.
- Google Notebook : A priceless extension that adds a place to pull together bookmarks and notes on mostly temporary projects. Sometimes you're researching something and you don't necessarily want to clutter up your permanent bookmarks (like maybe a hotel in a city or something). This is a great place to put these things, and add notes as well. I just need to remember to use it more!
- Google Toolbar : With Firefox 2.0 having spellchecking builtin, I'm not sure I need this so much any more. It has a very nice spellchecker, and a bunch of quick ways to search Google, but I'm not sure it is worth the screen real estate any more.
- Googlepedia : Another favorite extension, this one splits Google search pages into two vertical windows. The Google search results are on the left and the nearest appropriate Wikipedia page is on the right. I'd say in about 75% of the searches, the correct Wikipedia page shows up. It's nice to be reminded to search in that treasure trove of information, as I would often forget.
- SiteAdvisor : Adds a little icon to Google search links to say whether it is okay or a den of spyware.
- Plain Text to Link : Highlight those pesky URLs that don't have links in them, right click and jump to them.
- Web Developer : Adds a whole host of useful web developing tools to a menu.
- Zotero : A Firefox 2.0 only extension, it adds a window at the bottom of the browser to help with Real Research, for things like citations and the like. Haven't used it much, but I intend to.
So that's what I have right now. Sixteen! I wonder just how slow they all make FF? I'm sure startup must be affected, but because I do it at login and hardly ever after that, it's not a real problem. And I'm noticing I don't have Performancing, which is a very nice blog editing extension, so I think I'll install it now.
How about you?
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