Favorite Firefox plugins

#Introduction

Open source software affords the opportunity to use your applications for all they are worth. Some projects even allow the extension of an application’s functions by writing plugins (or “extensions”). Firefox is one of those applications. I haven’t used Safari ever and it has been years since I used Internet Explorer so I don’t know if they offer this but the ability to really take control of what my browser is doing keeps me coming back to Firefox (and occasionally Chrome). Below is my list of favorite plugins with comments on what they do and how I use them.

##Adblock Plus

Let’s be honest, the Internet is built and paid for to a large extent by advertising. That being said, I still would rather not look at ads if possible. Adblock Plus is a great plugin to eliminate lots of advertising from sites you visit. I had to go back and disable this plugin to view a few ads just to remind myself of what I am missing! Very effective, very easy to use an install.

##Reddit Enhancement Suite

If you don’t use Reddit you may want to ignore this one. For those that use Reddit this is a really sweet little plugin. With RES you can alter the interface of Reddit, follow conversation threads easier and a host of other things. I use this most for editing the subreddit menu at the top of the screen and hitting the [l+c] button to open the linked item and reddit comments. It also includes a lot of keyboard navigation enhancements but I have that covered with Pentadactyl (see below).

##Scrapbook

The first plugin or extension I add to any install of Firefox. Scrapbook captures a webpage with all its links, pictures, etc. intact. I have used this to prepare slide presentations for when I want to show a page but may or may not have access to the Internet during the lecture. Along with simple capture you can edit the page, leave notes, highlights, etc. to really make the page useful. Use this in conjunction with Adblock Plus or you will be capturing a lot of advertisements!

##XMarks

If you use more than one computer with Firefox then you will want some way to synchronize your bookmarks and tabs between machines. XMarks is one of the oldest ways and still one of the best. It handles making sure I can get to my bookmarks no matter what machine I am on and opens Firefox with the last open tabs no matter what machine I am opening it from.

##Zotero

If you are involved in academia at all, preparing papers for teaching or writing papers for school, Zotero is a great tool. With Zotero you can save bookmarks to research sources, save whole PDFs, annotate your sources, add tags and reference data. When you are ready to write the paper it will even output your bibliography entries for you. Where was this thing when I was in school? (probably not conceived of yet as Arpanet still hadn’t gotten off the ground!)

##Pentadactyl

I have written before about my love of the text editor Vim. Pentadactyl is an implementation of many of the keybindings for Vim to drive Firefox. Want to move to a different tab (i.e. “buffer”)? Just hit “b”, get a list of tabs with numbers and pick the number you want. What to open a new tab? Go to command mode and hit “to”: :to. Amazing, now my fingers can stay on the home keys more of the time making getting things done faster. One thing to note is that Pentadactyl is under constant development, often Firefox will come out with an update that will break a Pentadactyl install. Usually all you have to do is visit their website and get the latest nightly update to fix any problems.

#Conclusion

So, what are your favorite Firefox plugins? Leave a note in the comments with thoughts, I love trying out new stuff!