I have been using Mozilla Firefox (formerly Phoenix and Firebird) for a long time now as my default web browser. One of the great things about Firefox is the huge number of useful extensions that you can use to customize your browser. Instead of getting the kitchen sink, you can modify it to suit your own needs.
Also, with the latest Firefox releases, there is an update system which automatically updates any extensions that you have when you upgrade your browser. This is a big improvement from previous versions, which would force you to manually reinstall all of your extensions whenever you got a new version of Firefox.
One final thing before I get to the extensions, I'm generally not a big fan of "skins" and "themes", but I've made an exception for Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) which is an incredibly slick, modern and functional theme.
Adblock lets you selectively remove parts (often advertisements) of web page. You can filter out images that match, say, doubleclick.com, or some other site that servers up advertisements. People have compiled lists of URL parts to block and it's very easy to add your own. You can even use it to get rid of irritating Flash stuff such as, say, the ESPN page. Combined with Firefox's native popup blocking, it makes for a much calmer, information-centric browsing experience.
Down Them All (they have a funky spelling / capitalization that I'm probably messing up) is an excellent bulk download utility. You can use to get Firefox to download all images, videos, or any defined file type from a given page. All you have to do is right-click on the page, and it shows you a list of all of the links on the page. You can choose one of their custom filters (archives, movies or images) or even make your own.
This extension shows weather icons in any toolbar (I've put mine in the bottom statusbar, next to Foxytunes) for a few days and nights. You can select your location and the number of days you want to see the weather forecast for. By default, you see the forecast summary (i.e. sunny), temperature and winds, but you can very easily add all sorts of information such as UV index, dew point, tides, humidity or chance of precipitation to the display. Very customizable.
Foxytunes is one of those "ultimate-laziness" extensions. It fits right into your statusbar at the bottom of the screen and lets you control iTunes or Winamp or whatever media player you use from within your browser.
The Googlebar is a Firefox version of Google's own toolbar. It remembers previous searches and gives you an easy way of searching all of Google's services including newsgroups, image searching and even Froogle from a convenient toolbar. There are a number of ways of customizing Googlebar including keyboard shortcuts for "I'm Feeling Lucky" and other types of searching.
This is an extremely simple but useful plugin which automatically converts any text that appears to be a web address or an email address into a clickable link. It's excellent for browsing forums such as Slashdot or Fark in which people either don't or can't make a link. You can optionally have the plugin highlight any text that it linkifies, but it's not really necessary.
Not everyone writes HTML, but if you do, this is an exceptionally useful tool. This extension creates a toolbar with an incredible number of functions for analyzing web pages. You can submit pages for validation, examine form elements, edit the page's CSS in real time, re-size the screen and much, much more. I use this every day at work and it has saved me countless hours.
Copyright © 2004 Mark Jeays. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
Last updated December 23, 2004