Shadows In Motion

Here is a quick list of my favorite extensions for the Firefox browser and why I like them as much as I do.  This is not intended to be a “top 10 list” of any sort.  It’s merely a list of my personal favorite Firefox extensions.

Also please note that I may use the words “plugin” and “extension” interchangeably in this post.  This may not be the technically correct thing to do but it was better than typing the word “extension” over, and over.

So let’s get straight to it, shall we?

performancing for firefox
I had to add this extension to the list.  It’s an incredible blogging tool and I really have to tip my hat to the folks who made it.  It’s so good, in fact, that I wonder how uneasy it makes the folks over at Flock.

It supports multiple blogs and multiple blog types.  Here’s the list of supported blogs as of 12/22/05 3:30 am:

• Blogger
• Wordpress.com
• Wordpress Custom (eg; a Wordpress blog hosted somewhere other than Wordpress.com)
• TypePad
• LiveJournal
• Moveable Type Custom

You can setup multiple blogs and you choose which you’re posting to from a simple list.  It supports formatting (which is done by CSS by default rather than HTML), you can edit existing posts, it has a list of all categories of your selected blog, and you can keep notes “off the record” inside of the extension.

If you blog then you “need” this extension.  Go get it!

foXpose
“Simple” is a keyword for me, and foXpose embraces this wonderfully.  This Firefox extension enhances the tabbed browsing feature without requiring you to navigate any menus or to make use of any button combinations.

A simple icon is placed in the bottom left of the status bar, to the left of the word “Done” that appears after a web page finishes loading.  Clicking this icon will instantly produce a page of thumbnails.  These thumbnails are screen shots of each of the web pages that you have opened in your tabs.  So now instead of trying to find the truncated web site’s name in the tabs you can simply click on the thumbnail of that site and its respective tab is instantly loaded.  The title of the website is at the top of each thumbnail.  Nice!

Here’s a screenshot of foXpose in use:

NoScript
Do you ever get tired of those Javascript applications loading in webpages, taking up system resources and increasing load times?  Or how about those sneaky Javascript programmers who figure out how to get around the popup blocking that is built into the Firefox browser; annoying isn’t it?  I think so at least.

There are also security reasons to not have Javascript enabled.  Patches can only fix what is known to be broken so if you’re the type that’s concerned about exploits on the web then maybe you would like to allow only specific sites to run JS.

Of course, some sites don’t work without it.  So you need a fast and easy way to enable or disable JS.

NoScript tackles all of these issues, and like foXpose it stays out of the way by creating a simple icon in the status bar.  The NoScript icon appears at the far right of the Firefox status bar.  Clicking the icon produces a menu with a list of every website address that is trying to run Javascript on the page that you’re viewing, allowing you to selectively enable JS for only the sites that you want.  Furthermore, you can quickly choose from this menu if that site should always be allowed to run Javascript or if it should be given only temporary permission.

Safe, simple, and easy.

The link to the next page is below.