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

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.

PDF Download

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.

Tabbrowser Preferences

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.

IE Tab

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.

Firebug

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?

Is there any good reason for me to install Safari [web browser]? I have no burning desire to do this, but wondered if I should be looking at Safari to see how the web sites perform on that platform. If no well known compatibility problems, I’d be happy to pass on the exercise.

From what I’ve read about Safari (I have no personal experience with it), the biggest advantage it has over Firefox is performance (this may change when Firefox 3 is released). It falls short though, of Firefox’s feature set and it doesn’t have the thousands of available plugins. I haven’t been tempted to use it as a daily browser. For compatibility testing, it would make the most sense to use it on a Mac, as that’s where the vast majority of Safari browsers are installed. Apple is getting a lot of heat for trying to “sneak install” Safari on Windows machines, along side of iTunes updates. I doubt they’re going to make much headway there.

Here’s a quick way of doing a Safari compatibility check on a single web page: http://www.browsrcamp.com/.

Jakob Nielsen is a web site usability expert. He knows what causes people pain and pleasure as they navigate around the web. Unlike most of us who became experts by just hanging around for a long time, Mr. Nielsen’s expertise comes from conducting carefully designed usability studies, using real people and real web sites. He publishes an online column called the Alertbox, which draws from these studies.

The latest installment of the Alertbox contained this shocker:

Getting to Google is Hard

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google?

I’m not talking about the challenge of formulating a good query, interpreting the results, or revising your search strategy to reap better results. Those are all very complicated research skills, and few people excel at them.

I’m talking only about the very first step in searching the Web: Getting to your favorite search engine so that you can run a search there.

Would you say this is easy or difficult? Think a bit before reading on.

**** pause ****

If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.)

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task. It’s not even a true task — that is, it’s not something users want to accomplish for its own sake or something we’d pose as an assignment in user testing. Getting a Google search box is the first step in searching the Web, which is only the first step in doing something real (such as, in one of our test tasks, to find “a strong vacuum cleaner that is easy to use, can pick up pet hair, and costs under $300″).

Also, for this round of research we’re deliberately recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding. (Our goal is to discover usability guidelines for the sites people visit after they click through from the SERP, not to document search engine market shares. As a result, we’re not concerned with measuring this precisely.)

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4

Hmmmm…it looks like a bit of review is called for. First, for the purposes of this discussion Google is a noun, not a verb. In other words, we’re talking about Google as a place, not googling as an action. OK? OK.

The original way to perform searches at Goggle has been to navigate to the Google site and enter your search terms there. To do this, enter Google’s URL (http://www.google.com) into the browser’s address box. After you arrive at the Google home page, type your search terms into the search box (see Screenshot 1).

There are often other ways to get your search terms into Google without navigating directly to their site. Most browsers also allow you to enter search terms into Google from within the browser itself. Firefox gives you a search box in the upper right that submits to Google and a number of other search engines. Click the down arrow next to the search box to select from the available search engines (see Screenshot 2).

Many browsers have the Google Toolbar installed. This little program from Google adds several features, including a search box, to a toolbar that appears at the top of your browser (see Screenshot 3).

You can enter search terms into Google using any of the three methods mentioned above. After that, you will see a search engine results page, displayed on the Google site (the SERP referred to in the Alertbox article). From this page you can click on links to various sites and return to the SERP (using the browser’s back button) to refine your search terms. The terms used for the current search can be edited at the top and bottom of the SERP (see Screenshot 4).

Any questions? Please ask them in the comments.

The ideas and philosophy at Skelliewag.org had a strong influence on the creation of the Internet Newcomer web site. I believe that simple design and compelling content are at the heart of any successful site.

If you are in the process of building a web site, or if you have one already, you owe it to yourself to read Skellie’s free eBook, The Simple Web. Here’s Skellie:

As bloggers and webmasters, we want most or all of these things: more visitors, more subscribers, more comments, more money, more inbound links, and more people saying good things about us. Our wants aren’t in question. It’s the how that gets us. It’s how that has us reading a dozen blogs a day, trying to find the answer (or at least a little piece of it).

You can stop searching, for now. The answer is in this eBook.

It’s true, you should read this book and try to put as much of it into practice as possible. I know I will. Here’s the link:

The Simple Web – eBook by Skelliewag.org (399KB PDF)