»Q«'s Favorite Firefox 2 Extensions

Below are some of my favorite extensions for the Firefox browser. On another page, there's an exhaustive list of the extensions I use.

Taking Back the WWWeb

One of the main attactions of Firefox for me is how well it embodies its old marketing slogan, "take back the web". Firefox gives users a great deal of control over their own browsing experiences. And there are some extensions which give even more control.

Adblock Plus (Wladimir Palant)
This extension makes it easy to block ads using your own filters and/or filter subscriptions.

Stylish (Jason Barnabe)
Firefox 1.5 introduced the ability to assign user style sheets to specific sites or pages but gave no good user interface for doing that. This extension gives that interface. If you don't want to write your own styles, many submitted ones are available at the extension's website.

Greasemonkey (Aaron Boodman) and Platypus (Scott R. Turner)
Greasemonkey lets you apply your own JavaScripts to pages. I can't write complicated scripts, but Platypus gives a nice user interface for creating scripts. There are also a lot of users' submitted scripts at userscripts.org.

ScrapBook (Gomita)
This extension is by far the best way I've found to archive webpages and to work with archives. Its features go far beyond what I could list in this space, but the website has good info, including a tutorial.

The User Interface

One of the strengths of Firefox is its relatively simple user interface. Because it is streamlined, however, it is missing some things I want, and extensions help.

middleclicknocollapse (Omar Khan)
This extension prevents the bookmarks menu from collapsing when a bookmark is middle-clicked. Very useful for opening several bookmarks in new tabs without having to drill down through the bookmarks for each one. (Note this extension is no longer maintained and probably won't work with the upcoming Firefox 3.)

Duplicate Tab (Twanno)
Allows cloning of a tab along with its history. This includes the ability to open links in cloned tabs.

All-in-One Gestures (Marc Boullet)
There are several extensions which enable mouse gestures. This one is my favorite, probably mostly because I have been using it for years. It just works.

Menu Editor (Devon Jensen, Nickolay Ponomarev)
Allows you to customize toolbar and context menus; you can add, move, or remove entries. I use a lot of extensions which add things to the menus, and without Menu Editor my menus get so cluttered I can't use them.

Web Development Extensions

I'm no "web developer", just a guy who makes some web pages by mashing his fingers against a keyboard while his favorite text editor is open. There are a few extensions which make this much easier.

DOM Inspector (Mozilla org)
The DOM Inspector comes with Firefox, but Windows® users must choose "custom install" of Firefox to enable it. It takes some getting used to, but it's invaluable for seeing how a page is structured. It's the best way to examine a page if you want to write your own style for it. DI will also inspect windows, in case you want to change the chrome some.

Firebug (Joe Hewitt)
This is an amazing tool for debugging and working with web pages.

Web Developer (Chris Pederick)
This is the SAK of developer tools. I think anyone writing web pages should have it.

View Source Chart (Jennifer Madden)
Also known as View Rendered Source, this extension gives a very nice source chart of a page as Firefox has interpreted it.

Html Validator (Marc Gueury)
This extension uses Tidy and OpenSP to validate and/or clean up pages. I try to make sure my pages are valid, and HTML Validator helps a lot.

Validaty (Henrik Gemal)
Validaty adds a toolbar button to quickly check validity with the W3C validator without having to open a new page.