Firefox Addons are extensions for the Firefox web browser from Mozilla. Firefox Addons make Firefox better, they make other websites and web applications better, and they make web tasks a lot easier. Here are the top 12 Firefox Addons that I use on a daily basis.
Note: these are all free to install and use. Many of these Firefox Addons take donations, so consider supporting the people who have developed them.
Personal Productivity
1. Remember the Milk for Gmail - An extension that makes Remember the Milk even better by integrating your tasks right in Gmail. Expect a full review of Remember the Milk in an upcoming post.
2. Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures – Fills the biggest void in Gmail (Google’s email application), by allowing you to create multiple email signatures for one account.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. RankChecker – Simple tool to check where you show up in Google, Yahoo!, and Live.com search results. Enter a URL and keywords, and RankChecker will tell you where the URL shows up in each search engine’s results for each keyword.
4. Live HTTP Headers – A more technical SEO tool which helps you determine what’s going on between the server and web browser when a web page loads. Helpful for troubleshooting URL redirection too.
5. SeoQuake - Provides a toolbar of SEO data, as well as data directly in search results while you are using sites like Google. SEO data includes lots of information about scores, ranks, links, keyword density, and other SEO factors.
6. Web Developer Toolbar – All-ini-one toolbar of information about a web page. Allows you to turn off and turn on different things in the browser to see how a web page looks (i.e. turn off images and cascading style sheets (CSS), and see how a page looks to a search engine spider).
Social Networking
7. Digg Firefox Extension – Creates a top level menu item (between “Tools” and “Help”) in Firefox that gives you quick access to Digg a web page you are viewing. Also reports on how many Diggs the current web page you are viewing has.
8. Delicious Bookmarks - Integrates a bookmarking function into Firefox, as well as easy access to all of your tagged bookmarks. If you haven’t centralized your bookmarks in Delicious yet, you are missing out!
9. StumbleUpon - Adds a toolbar to Firefox that let’s you interact with the StumbleUpon website: you can “stumble” sites for topics you are interested in (i.e. click a button and a new website is shown in that topic), access your profile, give previously stumbled sites a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, etc.
Blogging and Web Development
10. ColorZilla - Adds an “eyedropper” color picker tool to Firefox – use it to detect the color of any element on a webpage. Simply hover over the element (image, border, etc.), and click the eyedropper to get the hex value for the web color.
11. CoLT - Capture a link text and the link at the same time, as HTML or plain text. Adds options to the menu you see when you right-click on a link.
12. ScreenGrab - A powerful screen capture tool – see something online you want to remember? Use ScreenGrab to take a picture of it, save it to your clipboard (or as an image file) and paste it into another program or save it in a folder for later use.
BONUS FIREFOX ADDON #13: FireFTP - Simple, fast, easy to use FTP program for Firefox. No need to use a separate FTP program to transfer files between computers and web servers anymore!
Did I miss a Firefox Addon that you love? Leave a comment!