A while ago I wrote an article praising the FireFox browser. In that article I mentioned that there were some great extensions or add-ons that you could install to enhance your web surfing experiences. Here is alist of the plug-ins I have installed and use on a frequent basis.

Aardvark

As you glide the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You will also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist.

• Clean up unwanted banners and surrounding “fluff,” especially prior to printing a page
• See how the page is created, block by block
• View the source code of one or more elements

Amazing Media Browser

Amazing Media Browser automatically searches for all embed objects in a website and shows you a list of the source links. You can then conveniently browse through each link to see the content of the source file. These are usually Flash movies, Windows Media movies or mp3 file links.

It can grasp pretty much all the file extensions that can be opened with Flash Player, Shockwave Player, QuickTime Player, Real Player or Window Media Player. It even comes with a favorite links feature that lets you store unlimited links for later use.

Answers

1-Click Answers will save you even more time with AnswersTips that instantly deliver the information you are looking for. Just point at any word, hold the Alt key and click. Upon letting go, an AnswerTip in the form of a pop-up “information bubble” appears on the screen explaining the term.

CopyURL+

The CopyURL+ extension enables you to copy to the clipboard the current document’s address along with additional information such as the document’s title, the current selection or both.

del.icio.us post

Posts current page or link to del.icio.us. Adds an entry to the context menu and a button to the toolbar.

FoxyTunes

Do you listen to Music while surfing the Web? Now you can control your favorite media player without ever leaving the browser.

Supports WinAmp, iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine, Pandora, foobar2000, Windows Media Player, Xbox Media Center, Musicmatch, Quintessential, J. River, jetAudio, XMPlay, MediaMonkey, Media Player Classic, Sonique, wxMusik, Real Player, XMMS, Noatun, Juk, Amarok, Music Player Daemon, Rhythmbox and many other players.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

GreaseMonkey

Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of poular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org.

You can write your own scripts, too. Mark Pilgrim’s definitive Greasemonkey guide, diveintogreasemonkey.org will show you how.

IE View

For all you web developers who work in FireFox, this extension lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to *always* load in IE. Useful for incompatible pages, or cross-browser testing.

PDF Download

Allows to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML), if you want to view it outside Firefox with your default or custom PDF reader, or if you want to download it to your desktop.

ScrapBook

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are:

• Save Web page
• Save snippet of Web page
• Save Web site
• Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks
• Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection
• Editing of the collected Web page
• Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes

Screen Grab

Screengrab saves entire webpages as images from a simple right-click.

You can save the entire page as an image (it scrolls around the page taking shots and stitches it together), or just the visible portion, or the browser window.

TabMixPlus

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

Tiny URL

Create a short URL from any website. TinyUrl brings the http://tinyurl.com functionality into your browser. It takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place.

Are you annoyed with really long URLs like:

http://www.amazon.com/WordPress-2-Visual-QuickStart-Guide/dp/0321450191/sr=1-1/qid=1157483250/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-4806693-9709652?ie=UTF8&s=books

Now they can become

http://tinyurl.com/ep9nk

Then this tag is for you. Just right click on the page and click wapURL and you will be presented with a short URL. This is great if you need to send text messages or emails.

When you use the short URL the key passed is looked up against our database and the user in then redirected to your requested URL.

View Formatted Source

Displays formatted and color-coded source and optional CSS information for each element.

You can see exactly which CSS rules match for an element. The rules are displayed including file name and line number. The topmost element is that with the highest priority.

You can fold/unfold/hilite block elements (table, tr, td, div, span,…). Really cool feature: select a block level element of interest directly in the page and view it’s source! To help you to quickly analyze the source code you can view images directly from the source and add comments to folded block elements. The code view is based on the rendered document, so you will also see dynamically (by Javascript) created and modified html elements! Works also with frames and selected text.

Web Developer

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.

• Disable – The disable features allow the disabling of various features including the cache, JavaScript and page colors.
• Cookies – The cookies features provide various cookie related tools including disabling, adding and viewing cookies.
• CSS – The CSS features provide various tools related to the CSS on the page including displaying the styles applied to the selected element and live editing of the CSS.
• Forms – The forms features provide the ability to manipulate the forms on the page including display the form details and populating form fields.
• Images – The images features provide various image related tools including finding broken images and outlining images.
• Information – The information features provide various informational tools including displaying element information and viewing the document size.
• Miscellaneous – The miscellaneous features provide various tools including displaying a ruler and live editing of the HTML.
• Outline – The outline features allow the outlining of various elements including block level and positioned elements.
• Resize – The resize features provide the ability to resize the window to pre-defined or custom sizes and to display the current window size.
• Tools – The tools features allow an unlimited number of configurable tools including validating the CSS and the HTML.
• View Source – There view source features provide the ability to view the page source including viewing the generated source and viewing the source in an external application.

XML Developer Toolbar

A toolbar modeled after the WebDeveloper toolbar that allows XML Developer’s use of standard tools all from your browser!

Features include:

• Schema Generation
• DTD Generation
• Schema Validation
• XML -> Schema Validation
• Style Manipulation
• XSL Transformations on-the-fly
• DOM Inspector incorporated views
• Document statistics for future Semantic Web purposes