The last few years have seen the introduction of the concept of "extensions" in most popular web browsers. While Mozilla natively supports extensions, Opera and Safari come feature-packed and can be easily hacked via config files, and a market has cropped up around the IE engine which supports adding new functionality to your browser. In the interest of sharing a good thing, which are your favorite browser extensions?
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I'm not a web developer, but I often need to edit complex pages that I'm unfamiliar with. Navigating a complex table layout with image padding... yuck!
After reading so much praise in this forum, I downloaded the toolbar.
Wow. This is a very impressive tool. Thank you for the recommendation.
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For Safari I've really grown to like Saft. If I use a machine without it, I feel lost. I won't describe it here, it's kind of a kitchen sink type add-on.
http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft
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Hey, Adblock Lovers!
Have you ever considered that free sites you enjoy - this one?! - need revenue from ads to stay afloat? I think it's great to turn off Flash ads and 'annoyances', but if everyone cut all ads, marketing companies would stop using them, sites would lose revenue, and then where would we be? Paying for our visits?!
...or just letting all those IE-folk pay our way with their ad-loaded web life?
Just my $.02.
AS FOR MY EXTENSIONS:
- FlashBlock
- PDF Download
- Download Status Bar
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How people make revenue from their work is their problem. So you can watch ads and other people can not, and whatever happens, happens.
The "if everyone" idea can easily be extended to everything, of course. If everyone just downloads music/movies/tv shows/uses tivo, then musicians/movie investors/tv networks will lose. It's not exactly nonobvious or anything.
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Ads is just another way of trying to make me consume stuff, I have never asked for anyone to try to support their webshop with ads instead of paying members. And I really don't like the idee that other people try to influence what I buy.
I really don't like the admodel and rather pay for my news, I don't really see that I have a moral obligation to pay for stuff I don't like.
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Hey, Adblock Lovers!
Have you ever considered that free sites you enjoy - this one?! - need revenue from ads to stay afloat? I think it's great to turn off Flash ads and 'annoyances', but if everyone cut all ads, marketing companies would stop using them, sites would lose revenue, and then where would we be? Paying for our visits?!
So when I watch commercial television, do I have to sit through the ad breaks? Am I allowed to go to the toilet or make a cup of tea? If i recorded it, am I allowed to fast-forward? I'm sorry but if inline ads are your business model then your business model stinks. (Actually I think advertising as a industry stinks - it's a scattergun approach which just ends up passing the increased costs onto the consumer indirectly.)
Adblock and flash click-to-view are always the first two extensions I install. BugMeNot is also a great way round those web annoyances.
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Better than this would be <a href="http://adzapper.sourceforge.net/">adzapper, which runs on your local caching proxy and eats banner ads, too. Banner ads are spam, they should pay me to advertize on my network.
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There is simply no way that I can suffer the Web without 'adblock' (a Mozilla-family extension). Not only does it scrub the useless noise from my web experience, but I still get a brief thrill of happiness when a page flashes some useless ad, I right click, choose "Adblock Image", sprinkle some wildcards in the dialogue box, and watch it, and its space, disappear in a puff of logic.
A close second is "flash-click-to-play". It seems to me that about 99% of all flash content I encounter is advertising. Having all flash content replaced with a simply "play" button that I have to physically click before it animates - priceless.
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AdBlock is just a nasty hack though. I prefer Ad Muncher (www.admuncher.com), which works for all browsers even integrates as an extension/right-click in Firefox, IE and Opera. The thing is that Adblock corrupts pages and needs to be disabled for many pages, while Ad Muncher works (almost) flawlessly, and if an ad i spotted, rightclick and select "report ad on page" and the next day, the ad is gone.
AdMuncher is a keeper (even if it costs $24.95), and besides that GreaseMonkey (http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org) is great. Stop by http://userscripts.org for many great scripts for GM.
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Which is Your Favorite Browser Extension?
For me, it's AdBlock hands down. With my custom list, it filters 99.5% of all the crap out there and noticeably improves loading speed of web pages too. I really don't know what I would do without AdBlock. Of course, everyone will have their own favorite extension which they'll defend to death...so I'm not so sure what the purpose of this article is, other than igniting yet another flamewar... 
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firef...
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You should try Filterset.G:
http://pierceive.com/
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I *LOVE* AdBlock and Flashblock. They are absolute necessities. I just recently found this, "Gmail Delete Button:"
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=882
Then my other must-haves are DownloadThemAll!, NukeAnyting, User Agent Switcher, Web Developer Toolbar, MiniT, Forecastfox, Feeview, xMirror, and View Cookies.
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Tab Browser Extension for FF/Moz
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en
The only extension I need
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garapheane
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I only use one extension, and that is Adblock. I have lost ALL patience for website ads and I block them all. I realize they are a source of income for websites. If I want the content, I'd rather pay for it than be subjected to ads.
Tabbed browsing is a feature rather than an extension, but it's something I can't live without.
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1. NoScript: A whitelist for JavaScript. Although it is not yet stable and disables a lot of other extensions, it makes most of those unnecessary and makes it much safer and less annoying to use the web.
2. FlashGot: Lets me continue to use FlashGet as my download manager.
3. FlashBlock: Lets you block annoying Flash ads by default, at least when it isn't disabled by NoScript.
4. FLST and miniT: Makes the tab bar work properly.
5. ForecastFox: The weather, just in case you need to go outside.
Now for anti-favorites, I'd have to go for every bookmark management and syncronization extension, because I've tried them and they all suck and some delete your bookmarks. And AdBlock, although that is OSNews's fault not AdBlock's: OSNews serves content with NetShelter, while every other site I've seen only serves ads from it. So I can't block NetShelter because of OSNews. Things like this make AdBlock nearly useless, leaving NoScript as my only recourse. Of course the only reason I need to block the ads is that so many of them contain bad or malicious code - I have no problem with commerce per se.
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I'm glad to hear that. I don't mean to diss your site - when I was using AdBlock to protect my browser, I tried blocking NetShelter and it made OSNews not work properly. That was probably a temporary glitch though.
I suppose it doesn't matter now, as NoScript disables AdBlock anyway, and makes it mostly unnecessary.
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But the ones I use most are Colorzilla, Web Developer toolbar, and View Rendered Source.
All very useful.
On the subject of AdBlock, I don't think it's fair to sites to lose ad revenue by having banner ads blocked. I can understand pop-ups. So basically you are all saying that OSNews and other good sites don't deserve any ad revenue to keep the site going?
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i am usually accessing websites remotely through a terminal services session
when flash is displayed it causes everything to come to a crawl
with the flash click to play extension i have the option of displaying the flash if i really need to, this speeds things up immensely when browsing remotely
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On Internet Explorer...
1. FlashGet: Because downloads still need managing after they're done downloading, and because I only think I should have to download videos once, not every time I watch them.
2. Microsoft Update: Windows and Office updating in one interface.
3. The Server 2003 "Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration": When enabled, this makes Internet Explorer safe to use. With the exception of downloading files, there is no function that this extension disables that it is safe to allow Internet Explorer to do, well ever, really.
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