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I've been using Firefox since a friend of mine (special thanks to Legueux) IM me "Try it, it's unbelievably better than IE" (with an IMed style). I start extending the Mozilla browser at the same time. It's, IMHO, the greatest strength of Firefox when compared to other browser. Extensions are incredibly compatible with each other, there are very few collisions compared to the number of extension that exists. My Firefox may be over-extended, but it does exactly what I want (except for a very few actions).
In the first place it's important to understand my goals when extending the Fox. I have a widescreen laptop and I'm not a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. This mean no middle-click, a desperately wide unused screen space and special drag and drop behavior. I've always been fitting my software right for my hardware.
Just look at the layout of my Firefox on my Ipernity account. There are 8 screen captures presenting different aspects of my browsing experiment.
Let's take a look at extension list (sorted by the arbitrary alphabet) with comments :
Adblock Plus is very helpful for taking all that flashy crap out of the browsing way. Creating advertising filters is easy and the exporting/importing tools are fine. It's a well known extension so I won't carry on the description.
Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper completes the first extension with help on creating filters for DOM elements. It works better on structured sites with serious webmastering.
All-in-One Sidebar brings major changes to the browser. the main feature is making "download window", "extension window", "page's information window" and the such open in the sidebar. When used in combination with other extension it brings a great browsing power. It also enhances everything that load in the sidebar (eg : you don't need any "extension manager" like this one) and makes sidebar show/hide really easy. If you want a one-window browser this is what you need.
Boost for Facebook considering the time <s>wasted</s> spent on Facebook... With a few good tricks really helping, it's worthy only for addicts but it's as addictive as the original service !
Cache Viewer list all your cache entries, support filtering, image preview and easy download. The extension becomes handy when crawling audioblogs (but it doesn't beat Songbird for this purpose) and flogs.
Cookie Button changes the cookie policy for the current site in two clicks : one to open the policy menu, one to choose. That simple... It does exactly what it's supposed to, nothing more, nothing less.
Customize Google considering the time spent on Google... The sticky-google-preferences (by modifying searchs' URL load a set number of result in a set language with a set interface language) feature and the WayBackMachine hack (adds link to see the cache of the page on google searches) are great.
Download Helper is deactivated. Download all that .flv content easily. For Youtube addicts it's a great saving tool, but for me it's not needed on a day to day basis.
DownThemAll! is deactivated, but I reactivate it from time to time when needed. It download every linked file (except .htm, .html, .js, etc.) on a page. The extension supports simultaneous downloads and filtering. Very handy for downloading every file from a FTP folder. I was once told that it was the perfect tool for warez leechers, but I never tried it this way.
FEBE comes as the most powerful recovering extensions. It makes your "customized" firefox installation a breeze. It backs-up every .xpi, preference file and the such along with whatever you want it to back-up wherever you want it to back up. It can also recover previous back-ups. A must-have for every power extender !
Firefm is great when it comes to make your computer a smart radio. It guesses right when using similar artist radio station. There are some bugs with using your last.fm profil data but the biggest issue is it takes way too much screen space. A dropdown button would be enough, I don't need a toolbar !
FireFTP is deactivated and reactivated when needed. It's a simple FTP client with drag and drop capabilities, password remembering. It can seems basic but simplicity is his strength !
Gmail Space can turn your 6GB+ Gmail account into a storage place. Upload your files to a service that as almost no down-time. File size are limited (does have file cut and paste built in), but it is still great.
Googlepedia shows the wikipedia page corresponding to your google search right into the result page. This is typically a widescreen extension. It's slow but still worthy. The only enhancement I would ask is a multi-language integration (it searches only on the google interface language).
GooglePreview makes Exalead useless. Try Exalead ! You'll notice (and probably enjoy) the sites thumbnails beside the results. GooglePreview bring this power to Google with an amazing speed. It helps a lot (and should be a Google option).
Greasemonkey is deactivated because I didn't find any script worthy enough, and I can't write Javascript (yet). I'm waiting for the script that will change that and looking forward to code my own.
handytag really handy when tagging your bookmarks. One can even let the tagging occur by itself (with the risk of having too many tags) or simply quicken the manual tagging.
LastTab this one is kind of neutral. It has some great features, but has some serious issues in the option window. In order to get the visual part, changes to the CTRL+TAB behavior must be applied. CTRL+TAB pops-up a tab-list window with tab preview, tab list and mouse-over selection. But it sorts tabs by most recently used. It's not bad, just "compulsory". It also offers some other tab enhancement, but I don't use them.
Link Alert adds a small icon to warn you about the nature of the link you mouse-over. It also warn you about new window links. Considering how small is my status bar free space, It's great.
MultiSidebar is perfect. It allows you to open a maximum of four (left, right, top and bottom) sidebars simultaneously. Combined with Tab Sidebar and All-in-One Sidebar it's really great. It will be explained in the "sidebar section".
Operator is kind of experimental for now. It seriously lacks of customization capabilities, but should get really better quickly. It detects microformats and propose corresponding actions (looking an adress on googlemaps, adding an event to a web based calendar...). It will be more and more useful, as webmasters start using semantic web tools.
Personal Menu reallocate vertical space by deleting the menu bar. It replaces it by a very customizable drop down button. You can make your menu as you want it to be (eg : I placed "Option", "Recently closed tabs" and "Restart" as top entries, I removed the "For IE users" and I add a "extension" sub menu).
Scrapbook stores every page (and even site with the "in depth capture") on your hard drive. It's a great add-on very useful to get a site available off-line. I saved a bunch of programming tutorials for languages I use and the local search engine became an essential tool. It also support pages edition (notes, highlights...).
Tab History should be a firefox default. With this installed, new tabs inherit history. It's kind of an obvious feature for tab based browsing.
Tab Sidebar is TEH ONE ! It makes the tab bar vertical and populate it with (optionally up to date) thumbnails. It also add navigation buttons (Stop, History, Reload) on the page preview. Browsing without it became painful because of all I-change-size, I-have-a-short-and-generic-name (like all these "faceboo..." and "Gmai..." tabs you can't recognize from one another) and you-must-click-on-me-to-refresh-me tabs.
Tabs Open Relative should be a firefox default (or a least an option). It reorder tabs as you open them. Having three tabs open, say A, B and C and clicking on links X and Y from within tab A makes your tab bar (or sidebar) looks like A, X, Y, B, C. Related tabs being close to each other, it helps structure your tab browsing. You won't have to scroll your whole tab bar to get to the page you need.
United States English Dictionnary complete the French localized firefox I run.
userChrome.js became essential to my browsing since firefox 3 is out. Mozilla decided that I would have to press ALT+ENTER in order to get typed URL to open in a new tab. The extension is similar to Greasemonkey except that it use chrome scripts. It runs a .js file located in your profile and apply it to the chrome of your browser. As I installed userChrome.js, I plugged my first script in it and it did make typed URL opens in a new tab ! I then found and installed other scripts (bookmarks open in a new tab ; allow smart bookmarks in the searchbar) and I really think that this add-on is useful !
WikiLook pops up word definition from wikitionnary on SHIFT+MOUSEOVER. It works in any language (haven't tested them all) and has a great speed.
A little explanation on my sidebar system would be good.
The first extension I installed was "Tab Sidebar" and I can't browse without it. Navigation buttons on thumbnails really changed my browsing, and I can't go back to the old way. I then had a problem with the tabbar reappearing (and stretching page content, taking precious vertical space) each and every time an other sidebar was opened (Bookmarks, History...). I discovered All-in-One Sidebar and MultiSidebar simultaneously and it really helped me out.
It now works very fine : I have a "stable" Tab Sidebar on the right of the screen, and a multitask sidebar on the left.
The right sidebar can be hidden or closed (only in the latter case is the normal tabbar opened)
The left sidebar can load various content : Bookmarks, Browsing History, Download Window, Extension Manager, Page's Information, Source Code, any web page, Error Console, Operator Sidebar, Scrapbook Sidebar.
Buttons have been placed all over the GUI with a special care for space usage and mouse moves optimization (eg : buttons that open a left sidebar are on the left ; personal bar is on the right (next to the Tab Sidebar))
Other extensions I like but I don't use :
Tree style tab : it's not compatible with Tab Sidebar so... I would have adopted it but I can't.
Multiple Tab Handeler : same thing...
GroovyNotes : I don't know that many geeks and it's a "social" extension so...
What I don't like about my Firefox's behavior.
The main issue is it doesn't load multiple bookmarks in a new tab. For normal bookmarks it doesn't behave that way thanks to a userChrome.js script. I'll fix the script as soon as I'm able to write javascript.
There is also something that I would like to see in the next version of Firefox (or in an extension) : multi-arguments smart bookmarks. For now, smart bookmarks only have one argument. But I want a smart bookmark that translates words from a language to another. I created several bookmarks referring to the google translate tool but it would be great to have something like "translate fr en traduction" leading to the same page. Maybe an Ubiquitous command would be easier to code !
Firefox can really change your browsing ; and your browsing can change your Firefox.
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