Since switching to Firefox, there are a few add-ons that I found essential to making Firefox quick and easy to work with.

I thought I’d share my list of addons, and explain how some work very well together.

First, to get the addons, you need to start Firefox, then go: tools -> add-ons

From the addon window (which I have resized to full screen height), click on the “get add-ons” button, then enter the add-on name in the “search all add-ons” box.

• Adblock Plus  blocks annoying advertising. Just remember that some websites rely on advertising to survive… so if you use Adblock Plus, you should feel a certain level of guilt… but not too much 🙂
• Close Tab By Double Click. You don’t have to waste time closing a tab by aiming to click on the tiny “x”. Now you can close a tab by just double-clicking anywhere on the tab. This addon works well with the tab kit add-on (by activating: options -> tabs -> close buttons -> don’t show any close buttons)
• Flashblock blocks flash objects, yet lets you re-enable the flash objects with just a click. Great for blocking ads that Adblock Plus cannot block. Also good for making a “busy” website look easier on the eyes.
• Menu Editor. I’ve only used this to change the right-click on a link action to: popup the a menu that has the option: “Open Link in New Tab” option at the top of the menu.
• QuickDrag: when you highlight a few words on a page, then drag the words a few pixels away, a new tab opens with the search results on those works (ie no need to copy and paste them into google). If you highlight and drag a url (eg: computer-aid.com.au ), then that url is opened in a new tab.
• Remove New Tab Button will remove the annoying “new tab” button that hangs around at the end of the tab bar. Works perfectly with the tab kit add-on and the close tab by double click add-on.
• SearchStatus will display some ranking information about each site you visit. Once installed, I “move” it to the menu bar (at the top of the window), by right-clicking on the “q” logo, I select “highlight nofollow links” so all nofollow links show up as pink. I also enable pagerank, alexa, compete, mozrank.
• Split Browser work well on widescreen monitors. You can view 2 websites side-by-side, and I often enable the “sychronously scroll” option when comparing 2 versions of the same website.
• Tab History Menu shows the tab history. Its just like the drop-down list near the forward – back buttons on the top-left, but you get the list when you click on the tab instead.
• Tab Kit is like a Swiss army knife of tab organisation. There is too much to explain here. I’ll probably make a separate post that shows my tab kit options and how they make firefox easier to use. In the mean time, you can install it and try it out yourself.
• TabRenamizer renames tabs to something more reasonable that what the website decides for you. This might not work well for most people. Why? I use it to automatically rename tabs based on my bookmarks. But when I create a bookmark, I give it a short name (eg If I bookmark computer-aid.com.au, I make sure I call the bookmark “ComputerAid”… but I suspect most people don’t rename any bookmarks that they save. Otherwise you can manually rename tabs, or even have them renamed automatically to a “random” name!
• Undo Closed Tabs Button just makes it easy to recover a tab that you might have accidentally closed (I seem to do it often). its just easier than going to history -> recently closed tabs -> then pick the tab you want resurrected.

You will probably notice that some add-ons will duplicate some functionality (eg remove tab close button). I’m not sure if I should make sure these duplicated options should all be set the same way, or if only 1 add-on needs to have the option set… but so far, I’ve not seen any add-on conflicts.