One of the great things about technology is the ability to customize the tools we use every day. Small, lightwieght laptops for traveling, robust quad-core systems for gaming and engineering work, multiple smartphones of wonderfullly variety to choose from… we have great options to choose from when looking for the right computing experience.
Luckily the same is true in most areas of technology. One of them being the killer app of the decade: the web browser. Today I happen to be a Firefox user, and the most important feature for me is the extension and plug-in architecture that allows 3rd part developers to add new unanticipated functionality to the browser. At first, I went overboard (who doesn’t) and added all the coolest plug-ins that I ran across.
Soon, however, I figured out the functionality that really enhanced my usability and quickly pared down what I needed to a select group of plug-ins that I install on computer I run Firefox on – including Linux boxes. The ability to have the same customized environment on both my Windows and Linux boxes is a huge productivity boon for me.
Anyway, here’s the list of Firefox Plug-Ins that I run at the moment:
- Scribefire Blog Editor – Blog post creating/editing tool accessible right from the browser.
- XMarks Bookmarks and Password Sync – The best bookmark and password sync tool you can find
- Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar – Allows me to have more than one row of bookmarks on the toolbar
- Smart Bookmarks Bar – This tool allows me to remove the text labels and control the space between icons
- Read It Later – Great tool to bookmark interesting one-off pages and articles that creates my daily reading list
- ColorZilla – A nifty tool that let’s me identify the exact RGB and hexidecimal color codes on any site
- MeasureIt – Another great tool for measuring the exact size of on-screen components down to the pixel level
- ShareAHolic – For a social media guy, this one is great because I can share a web page to any service I want to include
- WiseStamp Emial Signature – Ever wanted to have an HTML signature in GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other web-based email? Here you go
- Prism – Allows for creating of isolated web-apps similar to what Google Chrome allows you to do. Facebook in its own simplified, minimal UI browser? Yes please.
- Download Status Bar – This one is great to get rid of the download window that Firefox uses and puts all that functionality into the statusbar area.
So that’s what I use right now. These tools help me in my daily browsing, monitoring, reading and writing routine. Will it change – undoubtedly. As new services and tools come about, I’ll adapt as the tools change. They always do.
Photo Credit: Lordcolus
17 Comments
About Me
Rick Mahn is the Founder of SMBMSP, and Principal of Rick Mahn & Associates. With two decades in Information Technologies and Social Media Architect, Rick connects people & organizations by helping them embrace open interaction and renewed commitment to each other.Learn more about Rick.
Interesting post you have Rick.
Regarding the firefox plugins I can tell you that the browser became with them almost like an Operating System. You can install almost everything and almost working in the browser. Rudely speaking of course. The problem is that you must install only what you use. If you pass the limit you'll have a very slow browser no matter the speed of you CPU and Ram memory. I used to have all kinds of plug-ins but now I just a few that I use most.
Nice list anyway. I don't know them all.
I use Xmarks, Google Toolbar, StumbleUpon and for me is sufficient.
Well, you have a point about performance. There is a line, and once you cross it the browser become sluggish. However, I've found I depend on a couple of those plugins for email and Google Reader so I can't really jump to Chrome for performance on those (even though they are much faster there). I suppose it's a balance and depends on a person's requirements for speed vs. functionality.
Thanks for bringing that up, its always a good thing to keep in mind.
StumbleUpon is another good one that I've used in the past and access via Shareaholic. The official one you mention has more functionality too!
Firefox has make things quite easy to complete tedious looking things in seconds. The rich set of add-ons are enough to keep the other softwares out of equation which help to increase the performance of the system.
Thanks fore sharing this useful tool, Your blog is one of the most wonderful places to visit.
thnks for sharing..nice post..
Hey Rich you should add one of firefox plug-in on the list which called firebug The plug-in must populer for who is web developer
by the way I liked your post thank you
Hi Evden,
Since I don’t use that one it doesn’t fit in this particular list. I’ve used a couple admin type plugins for troubleshooting in the past. I’ll have to keep this one in mind as well. Thanks!
most of customized tool support a specific version , so we have make choice between tools.
True, however if you haven't upgraded to the latest version of Firefox, you're missing great features and security enhancements.
Pick the tools that work for you.
True, however if you haven't upgraded to the latest version of Firefox, you're missing great features and security enhancements.
Pick the tools that work for you.
And what's about search, like CurrentSiteSearch?
I agree with you kolorowanki dla dzieci this is great blog, thanks for this article, I love it!
These plugins are great and really helpful. I'm always looking for new plugins.
Oh!…that's great helpful, it's so right to me! Million thanks for the article,
Great and helpful article!
I usually use Firebug, InFormEnter and ColorZilla