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
Member since:2005-06-30
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.
Member since:2005-07-06
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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2005-07-06
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...
Member since:2005-07-06
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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2005-08-23
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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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2005-08-16
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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I excessivly use tabbed browsing, but the implented features are not enough for me, so my favourite extension is of course Tab Mix.
I also use Adblock, CustomizeGoogle and FlashGot, but without Tab Mix I cannot live anymore.
By default I miss features like reordering of tabs or reopening closed tabs, but there is a lot of other stuff I like about Tab Mix.
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adblock and tabbed preferences for firefox. my favorite extension though is moz only, and it is multizilla. it is by far the best tabbed browsing extension ever made but it doesnt do firefox. been thinking of going back to mozilla proper just to go back to multizilla goodness.
as for adblock, i only block ads that are annoying (top layer flash animations that cover site content, ads with noise, ads with excessive animations/color changes)
if everyone would switch to google pageads i would remove the extension. google did ads right.
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Before Deer Park, the top most-have extension was miniT+indicator (or something like that) for drag'n drop tabs organization. Now, Deer Park has this function build-in (but somehow, tabs selection changed from OnMouseUp to OnMouseDown, wich is *VERY* annoying for organizing tabs...).
Now, I would say the AdBlock is the first in the list (not just for blocking content, but also to look the list of all content in the page and copy'n paste... for movies/flash movies for example).
I just hope AdBlock could change on fly the overlay thing for flash with a simple right click in it's status item... and custom hotkeys... well, can't have everything...
Other important extensions are ScrapBook and FlashGot (DownloadSort for torrents too, but doesn't work with DeerPark right now).
And I'm just starting with Greasemonkey... The Slashdot mirrors userscript is a must-have+do-no-evil script! Some of them are very usefull!
Member since:2005-06-29
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I got so sick of those, in my opinion rude, flash ads that I needed it. Then I get so sick of, again rude, gif ads that I block out every carrier when I see one. I'm just about down to only allowing google ads.
Some people say it's unethical for you to do that to the website. But I say it's unethical for them to abuse their customers/viewership with obnoxious ads. Maybe they should better screen their ad providers... NBC, CBS, ABC, etc all do it... Although, they only screen out the political ads leaving the trite obnoxious crap..
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Sage for RSS -- I use pretty much a browser or an xterm, so an RSS reader integrated into the browser is perfect for me.
Adblock -- yet another vote for that.
Mozex -- The ability to edit blog entries in vi is just too cool.
MiniT -- to drag and drop tabs. I have Slashdot (sorry) on the first tab, comix on the second, and so on, so this can be handy for me if I screw that order up. (I'm not nearly as anal as that all sounds...
SessionSaver -- God, this rocks. It remembers all your tabs and will open them up again when you restart Firefox, even if you crashed. I still manage to crash Firefox every now and then, so this is a huge help.
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And with the Filterset G from http://www.pierceive.com/ Ever since i found out this filterset, i have not seen a single ad on the internet... awesome stuff
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Personally I can't use Firefox without the wonderful IE skin (http://pages.prodigy.net/zzxc/ieskin/)
TabMix, AdBlock and FlashGot is a must of course.
For my developer work I also love the "Google PageRank status bar" extension, very handy.
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I am so glad someone mentioned StumbleUpon. I probably spend 20-30 minutes a day stumbling. It is educational as all get-out and more fun than games!
I will add my vote to the other excellent extensions already mentioned:
Tabbrowsing Preferences
AdBlock
FlashGot
Google Bar
Google Preview
Netcraft Toolbar
Oh, and I use Noia Extreme 2.0 also, like it a lot. I used Sky Pilot for a while but got tired of it eventually. To me Noia has a more enduring look and feel.
Rob
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SessionSaver is the first extension I always install for Firefox and can't live without it. Saves your open tabs so that when you come back the next day it's just as you left it (if you turn your machine off at night, for example).
Other faves:
SpellBound (spell checking in various languages)
LinkToolbar (little arrows to navigate a site)
ForcastFox (the weather)
LiveHTTPHeaders (for debugging)
Tabbrowser Preferences
Web Developer (for debugging)
Adblock (of course)
Auto copy (copy like in Unix, no need to press Ctrl-C)
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2005-07-06
I use Firefox under Linux, and the above are my fav extensions.
ForecastFox is quite useful, especially since KWeather went to the dogs.
FlashGot is a real godsent: let's be honest, in linux we don't have fast download managers which integrate well with the browser, like in Windows. So I use FlashGot + cURL, a killer combo.
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Scrapbook is great for research. Save all pages that look relevant, then you can shift all the good reading from the mediocre reading, make notes, and higlight paragraphs, without the need to print out the whole lot. Further I'm using session saver, Adblock, all-in-one gestures , User Agent Switcher and the download manager extension to open the download manager in a tab.
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1. Flashblock
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=433
I imagine 95% of all flash content I see on the web is garbage. For the other 5%, I'm happy that Macromedia/Adobe provides plug-ins on platforms other than Windows, and that this extension exists so that I can stand having the plug-in installed.
2. Adblock
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=10
Since the nascent commercialization of the Internet in the early mid '90s, the web has become rife with obnoxious quantities of advertising; a great deal of which engages in obnoxious behavior.
3. BugMeNot
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/02/07/bugmenot
Increasingly websites (especially news sites) require free logins to just read content. This is pretty annoying, and thanks to BugMeNot you don't have to keep track of a dozen throw-away accounts.
4. Nuke Anything
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=951
Sometimes you're at work and you're reading some website that just has a plainly inappropriate image. Pull out the trusty "Remove this object," and all is well in the world.
4. Customize Google
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=743
The quality of Google results has been declining over the last year or two, while the quality of other search providers has been increasing. Sometimes
5. Image Zoom
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=139
Rather self-explanatory.
6. miniT https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=176
Being able to reorganize tab location is good for grouping related items after you search around for a while.
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I don't know if it counts as an extension, but Operas facility to start where I left off and reload all open tabs is invaluable. Doing research and being able to have a dozen sites open at once, and then not having to search for them all again the following day is just amazing.
And Ad Blocker too, on whichever browser I use.
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There's no question about it, the Adblock extension for Firefox is the one I use and love the most.
I absolutely *HATE* having to watch ads, and with Adblock I very rarely have to (and then usually only briefly until I add a new rule to block the new one).
Adblock is WONDERFUL in my oppinion.
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"
I don't know if it counts as an extension, but Operas facility to start where I left off and reload all open tabs is invaluable. Doing research and being able to have a dozen sites open at once, and then not having to search for them all again the following day is just amazing.
And Ad Blocker too, on whichever browser I use.
"
There are firefox extensions that the same things, so I think it counts. I also like the zoom feature in opera..
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Opera implements everything better by default. 
It would be nice if there was a keyboard navigation plug-in for other browsers. Without keyboard support they're worthless to me, so I stick with elinks and Opera.
Linked browsing is also pretty nifty, but it requires MDI (and Opera Mac is missing this, unfortunately).
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Page is in Japanese but this extension is definate for people who want to tinker with their tab settings to utmost detail. It makes Firefox just as good as Sleipnir (flexible IE wrapper tab browser - http://sleipnir.pos.to/&wb_lp=JAEN" rel="nofollow">http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/?wb_url=http://sleipnir.p...)
Web - http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/
Download - http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/confirm.cgi?tabextensions.xpi
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Looks like the web won't allow direct linking, but I guess the author also has english pages.
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en
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I want a no-nonsense browser that helps me navigate. I used Tab Browser Extensions for some time; the best enhancement was placement of close buttons on the tabs themselves, plus the ability to put all kinds of things into tabs instead of messy pop-ups or new browser windows.
I've read recently though that this extension causes some problems, and it seems you need a new version of the extensions with every new version of Firefox.
Pity these functions were'nt built into firefox.
Konqueror's tab functions (KDE 3.4) are about as good, though Konqueror still has problems with the odd Website.
Adrian Hicks
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Edited summary:
Platypus lets you modify a Web page -- "What You See Is What You Get" -- and then save those changes so that they'll be repeated the next time you visit the page.
http://platypus.mozdev.org
Look here for examples;
http://platypus.mozdev.org/using.html
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I really like this new extension called menux. It is great for laptop users. I turned off everything in the Firefox UI that was taking up space. When I need to turn on specific toolbars I can just press Ctrl+Shift+T and my favorite toolbars spring back open. Perfect for people using small monitors. http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=mozilla&content=c_menux_inst...
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1. AdBlock
Just another nod (like many of the previous posts) which imho is the best extension EVAH!
2. ConQuery
I'm surprised no one uses this, but sometimes my lazya** just doesn't want to move the mouse cursor over to the search box. With Conquery, all I have to do is highlight the word(s) on the page, right click, and choose the appropriate search engine that I have loaded in my searchbox.
3. Sage
Simple and lightweight, awesome RSS reader.
4. FoxyTunes
Yeah, I'm lazy. Control your mp3 player of choice through Firefox
5. TinyURL Creator
Man, I must use this at least 3 times everyday. Great extension.
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2005-07-14
Mouse gesture support is a must-have. I won't willingly use a browser that lacks it ever since Opera introduced me to it. And when I have the view-cookies extension, then I gesture left-down-right to quickly check a given page's cookies (which is handy when I am writing a web app which is setting cookies).
I love being able to select a web site address which has not been displayed as a hyperlink, and right-click->fetch text url in new tab. I really miss this one since I installed Deer Park alpha 
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Bookmark synchronizer is the Firefox most important
feature after tabbed browsing for me.
With bookmark synchro I can have my bookmark arrangment
on my office/home/friend PC.
With tabbed browsing I avoid to over-populate the
system bar. If it's necessary to use many tabs I
launch another Firefox instance and I can continue
to populate tabs.
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2005-07-06
* Notch up another one for Adblock (the reason I switched to FF from Opera)
* DictionarySearch
* Tabbrowser Preferences
* Forecastfox
* Plain Text Links
* MediaPlayerConnectivity - Streaming media in a player of MY choice..excellent! (MPlayerPlug-in can be flakey)
* All-in-One Gestures
* ImageZoom
* FlashGot
* Translate
I try to move people to FF from IE all the time and I usually get the "..ohhh..it's too different" response, until I show them what they can do with Extensions. Then they're hooked 
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My favorite one is Aardvark (http://karmatics.com/aardvark/) - a very useful tool for cleaning web pages before printing them.
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All del.icio.us extensions such as Foxylicious and "post2delicous" are very cool stuff. GMail notifier is simpler (but useful), GreaseMonkey (c00l!!!) and ForecastFox ruleZ. GooglePreview and LinkPreview are beauty tweaks too. AdBlock is mandatory for surfing the web :-)
alucardX (ibantxuyn)
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Well that's about the only thing missing in Opera, so I use Privoxy for that... Although highlight scriptlet (http://nontroppo.org/wiki/UltimateHighlightBookmarklet) is also very useful.
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Ok, I'm gonna list all of my favorites - and more than one I would classify as 'can't live without', but if I *had* to lose all but one, it would be this one.
www.passwordmaker.org
Secure, unique passwords for every site, and all of the users I manage, all controlled with one Master Password, all available to me at any time, as long as I have access to a computer with FF and the PM extension installed, or a web connection (for the online version).
As for the others that I consider either *essential or just very useful, even if only occasionally:
*TabMixPlus
*SessionSaver (until TabMixPlus integrates it)
*ImageZoom
*ContextSearch (much lighter than Conquery)
*Deskcut
gMapit (get directions from a phone number)
*IeView
*MDHash Tool
*MinimizeToTray
Mozilla Archive Format
OOK (adds bookmarks to context menu)
OpenBook (better than AddBookmarkHere)
*PackageTrackingExtension (makes tracking UPS, FedEX and USPS packages a breeze)
*PrintIt! (Print/Preview from context menu - really should be native FF code)
*ResizeSearchBox (this really should be native FF code)
Scrapbook
*Signature
Smoothwheel
StatusBarClock
*SyncMarks (better than Bookmarks Synchronizer)
*TargetAlert
*TinyURLCreator
TranslationPanel (very kewl extension)
UserAgentSwitcher (don't use it nearly as much as I used to, which is a good thing)
Zoomy
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can't live without it. admittedly it's totally specific to deviantart.com, because it won't help you do anything on any other site, but deviantArt has a huge membership, and it's tricky to get around the whole site sometimes. looking forward to the v2.0 release, which apparently has a lot of extra goodness to help site navigation, etc,.. http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/10222974/
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