Over the past two weeks I’ve been upgrading all of my PCs to Firefox 1.5 and getting their configurations matched up. If you haven’t upgraded, you should. It’s faster. So far it’s crashing less. And the Adsense Flicker Dance issue is fixed.
Here’s a list of the extensions I’ve settled on:
- Adblock. I’ve been using this since the Mozilla days and have a finely-tuned set of rules for blocking the most annoying ad content on the web. For folks just starting out there is the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, which automatically downloads and updates a list from ‘G’.
- BugMeNot. A Firefox extension that can automatically populated login forms using data from BugMeNot.com. I don’t seem to get much use from this anymore, but I keep it around just in case.
- Tab Mix Plus and SessionSaver. These have just replaced the Tabbed Browser Extensions on my PCs, together the provide all of the TBE features I was using without all of the stability and performance problems. Tab Mix Plus combines the features of many smaller tab-control extensions — when are tabs opened, should they steal the focus, are other windows allowed, etc. Session Saver stores a list of your tabs, complete with history and forms data, so that you can close (or crash) Firefox and restart exactly where you left off.
- Google Toolbar for Firefox. The real deal, straight from Google. Does everything that the IE version does, including spell-check.
- IE Tab. Sometimes you have to use IE. With a single click this extension switches a tab from Gecko to IE rendering, without ever having to leave the comfort of Firefox. Most cool.
- Viamatic foXpose. With the press of a hotkey get a Mac OS X Exposé-style view of all open tabs.
- PDF Download. Intercepts clicks on PDF links and gives you the choice of opening in the current tab, a new one, downloading the file, or canceling.
- Fasterfox. Provides an interface for tweaking several Firefox performance settings.
