In case you haven’t upgraded your Firefox to the latest 3.5, hit your Check for Updates… button. If you don’t have Firefox (*gasp*) grab it now!
Some of the features includes:
- Faster page load
- Faster Javascript
- Smaller memory footprint
- Tabs tearing
- Built-in privacy browsing
- And more…
This is also a good opportunity for me to share some of the extensions I use, 7 of my favourites which I may or may not live without:
Adblock Plus + NoScript
Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.
Adblock Plus
The best security you can get in a web browser!
Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks.
NoScript
With these two extensions, you basically idiot-proof your system against most threats. And it’d get rid of all the annoying ads, pop-up or otherwise.
DownThemAll!
The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!
DownThemAll!
The description is rather brief but dTa! is a must-get in my opinion. It has other nifty stuff like resume, queuing and mass grabbing of embedded static media and links.
FireGestures
A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures.
FireGestures
I used to use another extension but it became incompatible with 3.5. I run gestures without trace and only have short-cuts for Next / Previous Tab, New Tab, Reload, Reload without cache and Close Tab.
Greasemonkey + Greasefire
Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. …
Greasemonkey
Basically allows you to customise how parts of websites look with bits of Javascript; basically client-side changes to website. Of course, not all of us know what we’re doing, that’s why there’s a huge library of scripts available at UserScripts.
Automatically find Greasemonkey scripts on Userscripts.org (requires Greasemonkey)
Greasefire
Rather self-explanatory. Good helper to Greasemonkey and entirely pointless without it.
Some of the Greasemonkey scripts I’m running:
Categories
IETab
IE Tab – an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox…
IE Tab
There’s basically 2 function of this extension. The first is as the author intend, “easily see how your web page displayed in IE”. The second, which I mostly use it for, is to make a web page look sensible to me because there are still some sites which Firefox can’t render properly.
Tabs Open Relative
Tabs Open Relative makes all new tabs open to the right of the current tab, rather than at the far right of the tab bar (optionally this only applies to links).
Tabs Open Relative
New tabs in Firefox are typically chucked at the end of tabs list. This extension simply makes new tabs open in a new queue relative to current tab. If words are hard to comprehend, the author has a simple example:
In the case where several new tabs are opened in a row without switching tabs, each subsequent tab will be opened to the right of the previous one, so as to keep them in order.
For example if you have three tabs open, {A}, {B} and {C}, where the current tab is {B}, and then you open three more tabs, {1}, {2} and {3}, you’ll get:
{A} {B} {1} {2} {3} {C}.
UnPlug
UnPlug is an extension which lets you save video and audio which is embedded on a webpage – it’s a video download tool.
UnPlug
This is the only extension in this list that isn’t compatible with 3.5 but seems to work perfectly. Somehow the author doesn’t update at Mozilla’s add-on portal anymore so go to the author’s website to grab the latest version.
Some of the cool features:
- Don’t need to buffer the video
- Doesn’t send you to another URL to download the video
- Tries to locate highest quality video, meaning it’d help you get a HD MP4 video file if it’s available
- Integrates with dTa for higher speed!
Follow the instructions provided here at Lifehacker to circumvent version checking for extensions to use UnPlug. It has a huge USE AT YOUR OWN RISK warning but UnPlug hasn’t exploded on it yet.
Of course I cheated and listed 9 extensions instead of 7 but who cares. Hope this rare non-vlog entry is useful. Do leave a comment if you have any cool extensions to recommend or feedback for any of those in the list.
Subby
Dumdum