The choice of a web browser is an important one, because this software is the portal through which you experience the Internet. Most people never switch from the one that comes pre-installed on their computer, giving Microsoft’s Internet Explorer about an 80% share of the browser market. As you may have gathered from the big logo image over there, I am a Firefox user. There are many reasons why it’s my browser of choice but one of the biggest is it’s excellent (and free) selection of Add-ons. Add-ons (also called plug-ins) are small software programs that add various features that the parent program lacks. For example, I have an add-on installed called “IE Tab”, which allows Firefox to mimic Internet Explorer when it displays web pages. This is pretty handy when I’m developing web pages and want to check for compatibility between the two browsers. It can also be useful if you visit sites that were developed just for IE. Add-ons are cool and useful (though sometimes extremely geeky) and I want to share some of them with you that are installed on the various copies of Firefox that I use.
Adblock Plus
This does pretty much what you’d think it does - it blocks ads. And it does quite a good job of it too. After installation, you are prompted to select a server from which a list of known advertisers is downloaded periodically. All content from these servers is blocked from appearing on pages that you visit. Even the space that they would have occupied disappears.
If you install this Add-on, keep in mind that many sites (especially small ones) depend on ad revenue to pay the hosting bills. When you find a site that you visit often, find some other way of showing your support.
Delicious Bookmarks
The Official Delicious Add-on (by Yahoo! Inc.) seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, one of the leading social bookmarking services on the Web. It allows you to both save and retrieve bookmarks stored in your del.icio.us account, making them available to you from any computer connected to the Internet.
Screengrab saves entire webpages as images. It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images. You can then send the image to someone else, so they can see the web page as you did at the time. Very useful for sending information about broken web sites to tech support.
Some web page links go to PDF documents, rather than other web pages. This add-on makes managing these links much easier. When you click on a PDF file, PDF Download lets you know, can tell you how big it is, and can then give you the choice to open, download, or convert it to HTML.
Firefox pioneered the use of tabs for opening additional pages in the same browser window. This add-on gives you more options for controlling their behavior. This add-on integrates so will into the standard Tools|Options menu that I no longer remember which features it adds. Suffice it to say that this is one of the add-ons that I install with any new Firefox installation.
Using this add-on, you can open a new Firefox tab that will behave exactly like IE (in fact, it contains an embedded copy of the version of Internet Explorer that is installed on your computer). The only caveat is that it still won’t download the program components (called ActiveX) that only run in IE. This can be a blessing in disguise, as some of these components can contain viruses or other malware. But for display purposes, give it a try if you regularly visit certain sites that look all wonky in Firefox.
This one is so geeky that I hesitate to bring it up but if you’re in the 1% of people who want to look under the hood of any web page, this is the way to do it. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. In my work, I often need to see how various parts of a web page (called the Document Object Model, or DOM) fit together and what styles are being applied to them. The DOM can get very abstract and Firebug allows me to visualize it easily. A must-have tool for developers.
These are some of my picks but there are many, many more available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. Try not to go overboard though, as each one will eat up a little bit of memory and impact the performance of your browser.
Now to be fair, Internet Explorer 7 has add-ons too but I have no experience using them. Some quick Googling turned up these posts:
Seven Best Add-Ons for IE7
Mozilla Firefox is known as the world’s most extensible web browser, which is a big reason for its appeal among web geeks. But users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, Windows Vista’s native browser, need not be left out in the cold when it comes to add-ons.Best Of: Internet Explorer Addons
With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Microsoft has provided the ability to create and use IE specific add-ons to enhance the browser’s functionality. Unlike almost all of Firefox’s add-ons, many IE7 add-ons, though, are not free. That being said, there are numerous free IE7 add-ons that can increase productivity and make the IE7 browsing experience more pleasurable.
Now that we have fairness out of the way, let me know in comments, what’s in your browser?
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