I’ve been a longtime Firefox user, using many of the excellent plug-ins to extend the experience as I find more services that I use online. Like many people, I’ve let myself get a bit overloaded with added features, and yes there were several that I no longer use.
So tonight I went through my entire browser, bookmarks, organization, toolbars, plug-ins – the whole works. I’ve stripped down to the bare essentials and gotten rid of ALL the toolbars I had loaded. I never used them. Only the bookmark toolbar is left, and that went from about 50 buttons down to 14 buttons – it may loose even more, we’ll see.
The idea being that I put only the sites, services, and tools that I use every darn day on the bookmark toolbar. The rest of my bookmarks have been reorganized into one of (up to) ten categories – and yes I numbered them. When I click on Bookmarks now, I only see 10 categories. My apologies to Chris Brogan, I borrowed the term "rockstars" for the blogs I actually visit instead of reading their feeds.
I’ll be doing more work on the organization, but I had over 70 folders under my Bookmarks to begin with. Yeah, I’ll still have a hard time finding everything, but I believe that I can weed out feeds over time. This was to get the initial Bookmark menu so I didn’t have to scroll through it to find a folder.
So, I’ve got a ways to go before it’s fully organized to weed out the dead links and make it easier to find things but it’s a start. Wondering what add-ons I left in place? here’s a rundown that I use almost every day.
- Blog This in Windows Live Writer (Toolbar button to launch WLW with selections from currently displayed page.)
- coComment (Be able to add comments to my coComment account)
- ColorZilla (Color picker for on-screen, plus other tools)
- del.icio.us (Bookmark, add, and share links directly to del.icio.us. Yes there is a newer version, but I don’t like how it handles everything.)
- Download Statusbar (View and manage downloads in status bar)
- FireFTP (FTP Client runs in a browser tab)
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (Synchronize bookmarks across multiple machines)
- Google Notebook (Quickly let’s me add things to my Google Notebook)
- GUtil! (Adds a quick link to all Google utilities and apps in one toolbar button)
- MeasureIt (On-screen ruler, use it to figure out how many pixels something is/should be)
- Twitbin (Twitter client for the Firefox sidebar)
Well, that about does it for my browsing environment. Firefox is my main browser, but I do keep Internet Explorer, Opera, and Flock loaded for testing purposes. I’m thinking of adding Safari, but it’ll have to wait for a little while.
Now, what is your browsing environment like? What tools, add-ins, and programs do you use? Let me know. 🙂
