Popular Firefox Extensions Reviewed - First Half Dozen
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Tab Mix Plus is one of the most outstanding extensions in the category of themes and appearance. Simply put, it enhances the tab browser capabilities of Firefox big time. Surely, over the years many of its features were already built into the standard Firefox, but this little extensions still does more than we'd expect from it.
Everybody recommends this nifty add-on because of its high-quality session manager. Among others, it also sports productive functions such as duplicating tabs, undo closed tabs/windows, tab clicking options, control tab focus, etc. The bottom line is that every Firefox enthusiast should try out this extension.
Advertisements are one of the main profit sources for many web developers and companies, but under no circumstance should one webmaster ignore common sense and exploit the patience of visitors. However, every now and then we run into websites where there are more ads than content, and these ads take much longer to download than the rest of the entire web page. That's why Adblock Plus was invented.
This extension is really lightweight and truly effective. You can activate the context menu, right-click on the advertisement banner, and then pick "Adblock." With around 282,893 downloads right at the moment, we can consider this a vital part of the lives of many Firefox users. If you want to get rid of ads, Adblock Plus should be your choice. Apparently, it performs better than the older Adblock variation.
In one of my earlier articles I recommended FlashGot. I mention it on the sixth page of my "Popular Download Managers Reviewed" article published at Web Hosters. Be sure to check it out because I won't review it here as well. What it does can be explained in a sentence: it handles the integration of more than 40 download managers so that you can use your favorite application with Firefox too.
If you don't want have any stand-alone and independent download manager that you prefer, you should opt for the DownThemAll! extension. Unlike Flashgot, this does not rely on other applications; it refines the way your standard Firefox download manager works. You can consider it an enhancement. One of its key features allows the user to download all links and/or images from a web page. Moreover, this feature is expanded by the ability to verify MD5 checksum and even rename files.
It is beyond the scope of this article to explain what FTP stands for. However, if FTP makes any sense to you, then chances are you're going to need a cross-platform FTP client quite frequently. If you do, wouldn't it be amazing to have your FTP client right within Firefox? Yes, it is -- and yes, you can. Download and install FireFTP because that's what it's all about.
Other than being fast and efficient, this "extension"-based FTP client is also secure, since it supports SSL encryption. We should also name some of its other features: directory comparison, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop functions, file hashing, and even syncing directories while surfing others sites! It uses the same cache as Firefox so "cache-clearing freaks" should be aware of this.
Almost a decade ago in the late 90s IRC was really widespread; almost everybody was having conversations "via the IRC" thanks to the Internet. Running an independent application such as mIRC isn't an option when you want to chat within your browser, perhaps from your work (which you shouldn't, of course!). ChatZilla has quite a few features and most importantly, a pretty neat, customizable, and intuitive user interface.
This extension provides all of the functions that you would expect from a de facto standard IRC client: support for multiple servers (simultaneously), that stupendously long list of standard networks, logging options, DCC chat, file transferring capabilities, and you can customize the style of the user interface (colors, highlights, fonts, sizes, etc.) with CSS as well as add plug-ins written in JavaScript. Try it out!
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