I feel compelled to post this information for two reasons.
1) I love Firefox as well as the way I have my browser set up. I like it so much that I want to share these extensions it with the world.
2) I use several computers and I need a central place where I can list this information for my own personal use.
This is what I use.
Google tool bar: This goes almost without saying.
Add Bookmark Here: I can’t use Firefox without this one anymore. I bookmark everything! This thing saves me an amazing amount of time.
SEOpen: If you do any kind of SEO work you’ll want this one. It gives you all kinds of tools on right-click Including Google backlinks, Yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. Results open up in a new tab.
Web Developer: This one allows web developers to analyze the compete structure of the page, including elements like CSS style sheets, forms, cookie data, ID and Class details, Java Scripts, images and much more. I don’t do much programming but I like to have it anyway.
yExplore: It adds two yExplore options when you right click. Select Domain and it’ll open Yahoo Site Explorer in a background tab with the domain of the site you were on already submitted. Select Page and it’ll find the indexed and backlinks stats for just that page.
SEO for Firefox: All kinds of SEO tools in this one. Info shows up in the SERPS for individual search listings. Is slows down the page quite a bit but that’s OK because you can easily turn it off whenever you want.
I’ll be updating this post over time as new extensions worth mentioning become available.
What are some of the Firefox extensions you can’t live without?
Pearl Crescent Page Saver: This th the best screen capture application I have ever used. You can capture the visible part of the screen or capture the entire page no matter how long and save in PNG format. This has saved me countless hours of going into Photoshop and pasting several screen shots together to create a single image. Options let you control whether images are captured at full size (which is the default) or scaled down to a smaller size. (This is a must-have)
Update:
Search Status: This extension does a lot of stuff but the function I always use is “Highlight Nofollow Links. When this function is enabled, all Nofollow links are highlighted Pink. If you’re going to purchase or post a link somewhere, it’s good to know if the link will be followed by a search engine or not. This feature saves you the time of digging through the code to see if links will work for you or not.
Copy All URLs: This one will take all of the tabs you have open and turn them into HTML links. It works wonders with the “Open all in tabs” feature FireFox has. It’s a huge time saver if you need to create a list of links for a blog post.
However… You need to set this one up if you want ti to work properly. Matt Eason posted these instructions to make it work properly for this task.
- Go to Tools > Add-ons > Copy All Urls > Options
- Check ‘Copy only URL (no title)’
- Go to the Markup tab and select HTML
- Check ‘Use Own Markup’ and change the second $url in the URL markup field to $title
- Then you can hit Ctrl+Alt+C to copy the tab links to the clipboard (or go to Edit > Copy all Urls > Copy)
It sounds complicates but it’s super easy.
- Use “Add Bookmark Here” to organize everything into folders as you go.
- Use “Open all in tabs” to open every page in the folder.
- Use Copy All URLs to create the HTML for a links post for your blog.
Fox Clocks: This one displays the time in various time zones you have selected on the bottom of the browser in the status bar. If you need to communicate with folks on the mainland or elsewhere, this one is a huge time saver.
Portable Apps: Thanks to Shandy King who pointed this one out. This program enables you to install FireFox on a USB thumb drive! WOW! This is not a plugin but a for lac of a better word a “Utility”. One of the reasons why I created this post in the first place was so I could have a place to go with links to my favorite extensions because I use several different computers. Portable Apps has solved this problem and more. Now… I just take my USB thumb drive with me and I have my browser set up just the way I like it with all of my bookmarks and cookies intact. If I’m at a friends house and I want to show then something on the net, I just plug it in and it’s all right there.
Aloha,
Dave. 