My Firefox Extension List – Ubuntu Tutorials

This post is in response Aaron Toponce‘s “Ultimate Firefox Extension List“. I thought I would take a few minutes and make a list of the extensions I use and find that I’d prefer not to live without. On the one hand I do think they make me more productive. On the other hand I feel I’m less productive on any machine but my own because I have grown so accustomed to the extensions. In any event, here is my list (it’s short):

Vimperator – if you love vi you’ll like the vimperator extension for Firefox. vi keybindings for navigating the interweb. From gt/gT for navigating tabs, to hjkl for navigating the pages themselves. There is a long list of key bindings available in the :help. Again, if you love vi you will enjoy this extension, but be warned. It has a similar learning curve to the initial vi.

Greasemonkey – I use greasemonkey for a single script. I use it with my Google Secure script that I posted previously. I’m sure there may be some other scripts that are worthwhile but I haven’t spent a lot of time searching for them.

FireGPG – This allows you to sign / encrypt text or emails from within your browser. I prefer to use the more mature Enigmail within Thunderbird, but if I’m shooting something quick out of the browser I still want to see my emails digitally signed.

Again, I have a really short list. I like minimalist settings and features. Between these three I can keep my hands on the keyboard during browsing, make sure that all Google Apps that I use are https restricted and sign or encrypt (or both) any of my emails. Beyond that and you’re just getting greedy 😉

(I should note that the #1 cause of problems with the Firefox browser are 1) too many extensions or 2) conflicting extensions, which is often caused by the first. If your browser crashes, is terribly slow, eats up all of your system memory, etc try to disable some extensions. I almost guarantee you’ll find a difference in performance with some of the guilty parties removed.)

6 thoughts on “My Firefox Extension List”

Joe A 2007/08/20

For GreaseMonkey scripts, I started my collection with the ‘FindScripts’ (http://urltea.com/19oo) script. When the script is running, press Ctrl+Alt+F on while viewing a page, and it finds relevant scripts. Very helpful. Occasionally it will list tons of duplicates, but for what I’ve found with it, it’s worth it.

I found the Pagerization script (http://urltea.com/19oq) to be awesomely helpful, too. When active, to view the next page of results (for sites including but not limited to google (Search, Image, News, Group, Video), Yahoo, Wikipedia, Hatena, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, digg, photobucket… the list goes on!
And if you decide you don’t want it active on a particular page, just double click any white space.

Finally, Textarea Drag Resize (http://urltea.com/19ou). This allows you to resize text areas by dragging an icon inserted at the bottom right of the field. This does not work for simple one line fields, but does work well on comment boxes, for example.