Make Firefox More Productive With Add-ons and Extensions

Firefox has become the center of our online world
and there are several different add-ons that we
combine and use to keep ourselves more productive
while browsing the Internet.

There may be several wonderful add-ons out there,
but we will only speak of the few we use and the
purpose of it so that you get a general idea of
whether or not you should be using that add-on for
yourself.

Productivity Add-ons for Browsing, Managing and
Downloading

QuickJava

QuickJava is a real handy extension which allows
you to enable/disable Java applets/JavaScript access
with a single click. The add-on though not very
popular definitely helps, since it saves you time
from going through your settings and disabling and
enabling access. QuickJava sits in your status bar
allowing you to quickly change your preferences.

CookieSafe and

Remove Cookies for Site

CookieSafe is a useful extension that allows you
to block cookies quickly for any given site. You can
also control cookie permissions on a global level.

Remove Cookies for Site on the other hand allows
you to quickly delete cookies for any site from the
context menu. We can’t live without this one, since
it definitely saves a whole load of time.

FastDial

FastDial is a extension that brings a new feature
to Firefox, which is available in Opera by default.
FastDial replaces your home page and allows you add
and quickly access your favorite websites by
displaying small thumbnails, clicking on which will
take you to the website.

Though there may be several ways in which you can
access your favorite websites, we prefer FastDial
since it allows us to quickly access all our
favorite sites when we open up a new tab.

Related:

Get Opera Speed Dial in Firefox with FastDial

Drag Drop Upload

If you use the Internet to upload files
frequently you may have grown fed up of browsing to
the correct folders everytime you want to find the
file to upload.

Drag Drop Upload is a nice little extensions
which allows you to drag and drop files into the
file dialog boxes. Once you have dropped the file
the extension will copy the full path to the input
box. You can also drag and drop multiple files into
the file dialog boxes and Drag Drop Upload will
handle it, though this feature is limited to only
some sites.

Undo Closed Tabs Button

There are several times when we have closed a tab
by mistake, it was quite a pain to go back to the
history and find out which tab we had closed. Undo
Closed Tabs Button is a real life saver since it
allows you to open the last closed tab with just the
click of a button.

The add-on also provides you with a toolbar
button, using which you can see a history of the
tabs you closed in that order.

FireGestures

We like using the command line quite a lot but
the mouse definitely saves us a lot of time while
browsing. With FireGestures we have customized
several mouse movements to perform tasks that would
have taken us much longer the normal way.

All In One Sidebar

Managing several things in several windows is
always a pain, All In One Sidebar is a handy
extension that allows you to manage your add-ons,
downloads, bookmarks from the sidebar. You can also
view source for a web page or get more information
about it right from the sidebar itself.

Evernote Web Clipper

Several times during the day we spot interesting
things and may want to write about it later.
Evernote Web Clipper fits in perfectly with our note
taking allowing us to clip web pages, images and
text, so that we can go over it later at our own
leisure. You may also want to check out

Google Notebook add-on.

Save Image in Folder and

Save File to

While browsing we find different types of files
and images which we want to save to our computers.
We hate the save dialogs that ask us where we want
to save our files, since it is a definite time
waster for us.

We use two handy extensions the first one save
image in folder allows us to create pre-defined
folders to which we can easily save images, the
second one is more recent extension called Save File
to which allows you to save the entire page, links
or images in pre-defined folders with just a mouse
click.

While we prefer save image in folder for images
because it has a option to auto-increment image
names if a duplicate one is found. And yes both
these extensions allow you to skip the save file
dialog for good.

Related:

Save Images Quickly and Easily in Firefox

ReminderFox

Since we spend a lot of time using Firefox, we
prefer to use ReminderFox for several reasons. It
definitely saved us a lot of time remembering
birthdays, anniversaries, paying of cable and
Internet bills and more without having to maintain
another application just for reminding us about
important dates and events.

Better Google Services

We must admit that we use several Google services
in our day to day life, and there are several ways
in which Google could improve. Nevertheless we use
quite a few productivity add-ons for Google services
including

Better Gmail,

Better Google Calendar and

Better Google Reader.

All these add-on have been created by

Gina Trapani the chief editor of

Lifehacker and a person who we immensely admire.

Download Statusbar and

DownThemAll

The default Firefox downloads window is pesky and
keeps cropping up on us when a file starts to
download and finishes downloading, we prefer to
silence it once and for all using Download Statusbar
a handy extension that will create a tiny little
icon for downloads and put it in your statusbar.

On the other hand when we want to download
several things from a page there is not better tool
than Downthemall, just choose the content you want
to and it will down them all for you. It is also the
first download accelerator built inside Firefox.

More Tools Menu

The more add-ons you add, the more cluttered your
tools menu gets. More Tools Menu is a simple add-on
that separates the core tools menu from your add-ons
and creates a separate menu for them.

Definitely makes it easier finding the options
menu for any particular add-on.

Social Networking Productivity Add-ons

Feedly

We have never looked back since the day we
started using Google Reader, it is one of the best
online feed readers you will ever come across.
Google Reader definitely has made us productive
while sorting through thousands of sources for
content.

With Feedly we could take feed reading to another
refreshing level being able to manage and devour the
content with more ease than ever before. If you are
a heavy feed subscriber and Google Reader user, you
should definitely try our feedly.

Related:

Bring Google Reader to Life with Feedly.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is a great add-on for clubbing in
several social networking tools into one, you can
easily digg a page, stumble it, add it to facebook,
reddit it, tumble it, save it to del.icio.us and
more.

Shareaholic also show you the number of diggs and
del.icio.us saves for a particular page. We had also
mentioned this add-on in our earlier post where we
told you how to

convert Firefox into a social networking hub.

TwitterFox

We love twittering, but maintaining several
applications to

twitter our thoughts or follow others definitely
leaves us a lot less productive. With TwitterFox we
can see what others are saying or simply tweet our
thoughts from right within Firefox. Definitely saves
us a lot of time. By don’t forget to

follow us on twitter.

Productivity Add-ons For Development

FireBug

FireBug is a must have add-on for every web
developer. Firebug allows you to easily edit, debug
and monitor CSS, HTML and JavaScript for any web
page.

Web Developer

Web Developer is a powerful extension for
developers. It definitely makes developing web pages
quite easy. You can modify CSS on the fly, see which
layers are using which styles, modify cookies, play
around with images and practically do anything you
would want to do as a developer.

This is a real must have tool for any web
designer or developer.

Tamper Data

One of the best extensions that will allow you to
easily view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers for any
website. Tamper Data is a must have extension for
any developer.

XPather

Regular expressions have always been a favorite
of many developers, but for those who have been
using XML and know the power of the XPath query
language will vouch otherwise.

XPather is a powerful extension that will allow
you to generate XPath queries, modify them and
inspect them for any given web page.

XML Developer Toolbar

XML Developer Toolbar is a handy extension that
allows developers to work with XML easily and
effortlessly right from the browser.

User Agent Switcher

User Agent Switcher quickly allows the user to
change the user agent of the browser to see the
behavior of web pages under different browsers.

View Dependencies

View Dependencies is a add-on that adds a new tab
to the page info dialog and shows the dependencies
(images, CSS, js)for the page and their size,
allowing you to see which image or CSS is taking
more time to load.

These extensions and add-ons definitely help us
stay productive while using Firefox right from
browsing to social networking and also assist us
while we develop softwares for the Internet. We are
more than curious to know the extensions you use to
stay productive with Firefox so do let us know about
them through your comments.

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