Now I personally belive that Firefox is a far superior browser to all other out there (including Mozilla, which is might be a bit odd, but I just like the look and feel of Firefox). I am well aware of the fact that there is no malware for it yet, because it doesn’t have enough users, but soon it will. It still wont have the malware problems IE does, but thats just my guess. This comes up because in the news today, Yahoo! released its semi-popular Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox. About fragin time someone does it with a some actuall news tied to it. Of course there is always the A9 Toolbar also. I hate to say it though, as much as I like Amazon, I dont like A9. I dont like Yahoo! as a search engine either. So neither of these help me. What I would love to see is a Google Toolbar made for Firefox (not that I would use it of course, but it would be cool). It also begs the question, if its really nessiary. Right at the top of my browser there is a google searchbox, comes built into Firefox. In the mean time at least two Firefox/Mozilla devs have been hired by Google. Of course the reasons and what they do are unknown.
I also wanted to do a quick run down of my 10 favorite Firefox Extensions. (In no perticular order):
- AdBlock — Probably the most imporant, as it can block banner ads & iframes (so you can block google’s AdSense, which I just posted about).
- Tab Preferences
- ForecastFox — If you go outside (and for thoes that dont, you can pretend you do in IRC) you need to know the weather. With this handy little extension, you can see the weather in the bottom tray of your browser — Very customizable.
- Bandwidth Tester
- User Agent Switcher — Its mainly so you can fool the site you are visiting into thinking your running IE (can be handy in many situations).
- WebDeveloper Toolbar — Now this is an absolute must if your serious about the net, and do any web dev work at all. It gives you amazing controll over the page you are using, and quick access to many other things.
- Habari Xenu — Its an RSS/Atom news reader. Its what I use at the moment. I’m not going to say its the most Amazing RSS reader, but I haven’t found anything better yet.
- Google Preview
- Wayback — Be instantly transported through the WayBack Machine to any point in the pages history (that they have).
- NYU Coralizer — What I would say is another super useful and very critical extension. It allows you to right click and “Coralize” a link. This uses their special distributed cache proxy to pull up sites. Really good for when a sites been slashdot’ed or running extremly slowly.