This doesn’t have much to do with most of what I typically write about, but it’s interesting, I think.

This week, Mashable posted a poll asking people what their favorite Firefox extensions are. And since everyone knows that the best thing about Firefox is its ability to be customized, I thought I’d share my list of favorite extensions:

First, and most important, Adblock Plus. It’s the first thing that most Firefox users install, and it’s the primary add-on that would keep me from switching to Chrome. Go from an ad-free browser to one with ads? No thanks.

After that, we have, in alphabetical order:

• 1-ClickWeather. Displays today’s and tomorrow’s weather in my menu bar, with menus for more in-depth forecasts. Generally, though, the today-tonight-tomorrow forecast is enough for me.
• The Air Miles Toolbar. I have mixed feelings on this. It’s an extra toolbar (which means that it takes up extra space), and the search rewards are only through Yahoo, not Google (and I pretty much always use Google search), but it alerts me to whether an online purchase will get me Air Miles, and if it won’t, it’ll point me to a similar website that does. Of course, I silently curse at it when it tries to point me to amazon.ca, which does give miles, rather than amazon.com, which doesn’t (because everyone knows that amazon.ca is from the dark ages), but it’s generally pretty helpful in making sure that I get miles for things I didn’t know I could (like purchases on eBay). And if I feel like doing the searches for bonus miles, I just spend 15 minutes searching for the most random terms ever, just to build up my miles.
• Better Gmail 2. Lets me do things like organize my labels into hierarchical filing systems, and instead of a generic paper clip icon for an attachment, it shows an icon with the type of file attached. Handy little thing.
• CoLT. When right-clicking on a link, I can copy it as ready-to-go html code, rather than just link location. For an entry like this one, with links all over the place, that’s beyond helpful and saves time and clicks.
• Google Toolbar. Gmail, search, tranlation, comments, etc. in one toolbar.
• LiveJournal Addons. Mostly, I use this to open cuts on my own lj page, rather than clicking through to the original poster’s page. There are a ton of other functions in it, but I haven’t explored them in a lot of depth yet. Still, for my one use of it, I like it quite a lot.
• Morning Coffee. Instead of opening just one homepage when I open Firefox, it opens all the pages I open every day. I can set which pages open on any given day of the week, so when I open a browser, it opens my email, Facebook, Google Reader, particular blogs, etc.
• Read It Later. With one click, it saves interesting pages to read (and then mark as read) later without adding lots of bookmarks that aren’t actually long-term bookmarks.
• Screengrab saves web pages — the whole thing, a selection, or the visible part — as images. Helpful for things like creating screenshots of the Coffeehouse website for my portfolio.
• Wired-Marker. Oh, so handy for marking up the websites I’m reading for school and research. It’s like taking a highlighter and a pen to a book.
• WiseStamp creates a better email signature in Gmail, including HTML, an RSS feed, and images, which Gmail’s built-in signature tool doesn’t support. Much more professional-looking.

They really do make browsing so much easier and far more customized to what I want my internet experience to be, even though mine are all pretty foolproof extensions that don’t require a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of the internet. There are others (like TwitterFox and StumbleUpon) that I’ve tried but weren’t as impressive for me, and others (like Yoono) that I haven’t tried yet, but they’re consistently on the list of top add-ons, so I may or may not try them at some point.

So tell me: What am I missing? What are your favorite add-ons, and how have they changed the way you browse?

Tags: recommendations, social media, the internet

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