My Firefox Add-ons

I use Mozilla Firefox as my prefered web browser. Firefox allows you to expand its functionality by adding on mini programs. These are called add-ons. I thought I'd share some of my favourite add-ons.

AdBlock Plus This add-on blocks adverts in web pages. It collapses any content being imported from ad servers. You should see how small the Yahoo! home page becomes without its advertising. There are no more sponsored results on search engine pages, only organic results. It allows you to manually create exceptions, pages where ads are allowed. Where it detects any Flash content it displays a tiny button so that you can manually block this content.

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) This is a Bookmark or Favourites synchronisation tool. Put simply, if you use more than one computer it keeps your bookmarks or favourites consitent. I use three different PCs and find this tool invaluable.

TwitterFox If you use Twitter this is very useful. You can stay connected to your Twitter account without the need for having the site open. Any new tweets are popped up in a bubble at the bottom of your browser window. Clicking on the status bar icon allows you to read tweets or tweet yourself quickly and easily.

Facebook Toolbar Similar to the Twitter tool this keeps you up to date with happenings on Facebook via small pop up messages in your web browser. The toolbar allows you to update your status in the browser, see how many items in your inbox, view your friends in a sidebar as well as share the content of the page you are currently browsing.

Digg Toolbar This makes it quick and easy to share the content of the page you are browsing on Digg. With one click ("Digg This") you can submit a new URL to Digg to share with the online community.

Delicious Toolbar Like Digg this allows you to add and share online bookmarks to Delicious with a single click.

Colorzilla For web designers, developers or anyone working with graphics this is an eyedropper tool for picking colours. By clicking the tiny icon in the status bar you geta crosshair which when clicked on any pixel on screen gives the colour references in both Hexadecimal and RGB 0-255 values. This is incredibly useful if you see a colour you want to use. It also has the option to copy the various colour values straight to the clipboard.

Web Developer Toolbar Quite specifically for the web designer or web developer this toolbar has buttons which strip down the web page in the browser window to its various elements. You can view just CSS (styling), just images, identitfy different layers (div tags) - just about anyhting you might want to know about a page is there.

If anyone reading knows of any other useful add-ons please feel free to share.