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My Favourite Firefox and Thunderbird Add-ons

Tagged with: — ondrej at 1:53 am on Monday, March 9, 2009

I wrote down my favourite Firefox and Thunderbird add-ons (or plug-ins). Some friends of mine asked me several times.. here is it..

Firefox

  • Exif Viewer – shows EXIF data (such as camera model, focal length, ISO) about a photo without a need to save it and use an external application e.g. jhead.
  • Flashblock – blocks Flash advertisements and other “important” features.
  • FoxyProxy – very useful for using proxies and/or tor based on rules including securing also your DNS requests and not only the HTTP request part, e.g. use tor for google, proxy for NWS (not work safe ;) sites.
  • FullerScreen – for really full screen browsing.
  • GA? – a status bar icon that shows if the loaded page contains the Google Analytics code.
  • GooglePreview – shows a page screenshot (thumbnail) and its popularity rank on a Google result page. It is comfortable if you are looking for a page that you visited and you only remember keywords (for Google) and how did it look like.
  • Image Zoom – zoom in or zoom out photos or any pictures. Like for the Exif Viewer addon – no need to save and use an external application to zoom in/out the picture.
  • Link Alert – shows different cursors for specific links such as documents (doc, pdf), archives (zip), etc. Easy and fast check where does a link point without a need to analyse its URL in the status bar.
  • Resizeable Textarea – resizing of a textarea, a lot of times needed on pages with tiny textareas – so simple, but so useful.
  • Resurrect Pages – if the page is removed, the content is changed, but you are looking for the previous one, or simply the server is down, with this add-on you just choose a cache, that you would like to use (Google, Yahoo, The Internet Archive, etc.), to retrieve a cached version of the current page. Not always, but usually it works.
  • Screengrab – screenshots of the whole page, visible part of the page or a selection to a file or the clipboard.
  • Taboo – sometimes I have an interesting article, that I would like to read later in the evening, but I would not like to save it into my bookmarks. I use Taboo to store the tab URL, so it is not lost. It shows the stored tabs in a month view, so it is easy to see what did I store (and visit) on Wednesday two weeks ago.
  • XPather – all you need for XPath in Firefox.

Thunderbird

  • Attachment Sizes – shows the size of an attachment in the compose window.
  • Colored Diffs – for developers, shows coloured diffs from CVS or SVN.
  • Display Mail User Agent – shows an icon of an e-mail client of the received e-mail.
  • Folderpane Tools – allows to change settings for the folder pane such as the order of folders.
  • Image Zoom – like for Firefox. Very useful if someone sends photos with big or huge resolution to make them smaller without saving them (and using an external application).
  • Lightning – a calender and a to-do list with a lot of nice features and views.
  • Remember Mismatched Domains – if your e-mail server does not have a valid certificate and Thunderbird keeps asking, this helps.

Enjoy :)

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5 Comments »

Comment by Gábor Farkas

March 9, 2009 @ 10:14 am

regarding the ImageZoom plugin… i also used it, but then i found out that if you have a ‘recent enough’ linux system, then you have all those ‘3d effects’, and can simply zoom your full desktop with windows-key +mousewheel, so now i used that one.

of course, if you use something inferior (khmm. mac? :-) it won’t help.

btw. did you really put gentoo on that slicehost machine? wow :)

Comment by ondrej

March 9, 2009 @ 7:31 pm

yeah, you right.

on mac (leopard) you may use Ctrl & two-fingers on touchpad up/down :)

gentoo on slicehost.. yep, do you know a better linux distro? ;))

bye

Comment by Roadie

March 26, 2009 @ 9:56 pm

Would be really nice to be able to drag and drop folders in address book into other folders – making sub and ‘sub sub’ folders

Comment by Jason Barone

April 15, 2009 @ 12:18 pm

Folderpane Tools is def something that should be integrated into Tbird!

Comment by ondrej

April 17, 2009 @ 1:09 am

Jason, I can only agree..

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