As the industry is abuzz Firefox news at the moment, I thought I’d give a mention to a few add-ons that I use and find useful. You can find add-ons for yourself at Firefox add-ons page.
Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper: imagine the internet without advertisements. No banner ads, no text ads in the middle of a forum conversation, no pop-up flash ads Firefox does the last one by itself). Using Adblock Plus, it automatically blocks the most common advertising schemes (e.g. by Microsoft, Google, etc), and the Element Hiding Helper gives you complete control of extra things that you want to block - be it text, images, frames or whole pages.
CustomizeGoogle: this extension gives you a number of benefits including (but not limited to) filtering out ads, switching to a secure connection when available, removing click tracking, anonymising your cookies and providing links to other sites from Google search results. (Note that the ’sticky Google preferences’ option made my Gmail account all weird for a while, haven’t heard any reports of this extension causing problems for anyone else though.)
FireGPG: I’m probably interested and active in computer security a lot more than the average web user. Even so, I like to share the sort of programs I use. This handy extension allows you to tie your asymmetric keys into Gmail, so that, along with a ’send’ button, you also have a ’sign’ button for digital signatures, ‘encrypt’ button for enciphering messages, and ones that perform a variety of the two. I’ll most likely do another post at some point which goes into a whole lot more depth on email encryption, so watch this space.
IE Tab (Windows only): ever find that a website just doesn’t load at all when you try to Firefox to view it? After you’ve been annoyed at the designer for creating such poor coding, you can simply click on a small button at the bottom-right of Firefox window. This will change the rendering engine to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and you can happily go along using Windows Update or whatever other crappy sites you’re trying to visit. Note that since this extension makes use of inbuilt Windows components it is Windows-only for the moment, and that most likely won’t change.
Reload Every: ever seen yourself tapping away at the refresh button when an eBay auction is about to end, Apple are updating their store, or I’ve promised a new post? Now you don’t have to. This extension allows you to pick or set a time in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the current page. You can also configure it so that all tabs, or only one tab, follows this behaviour. Very useful.
That’s me done with Firefox plugging for the time being. Coming up soon shall be the first monthly post, and what shall be in it will be… a surprise.
If you haven’t already, you can download firefox for free! Try it out yourself and see why it’s the best browser on the planet.