OK, OK, I finally switched to
Firefox at home.
I've liked MSIE ever since 4.0, but I like Firefox for one
simple reason: tabs. Ctrl-click is my friend. The fact that Ken and I
spent nine hours exorcising
CoolWebSearch
that came in through an MSIE security hole also colours my thinking.
Firefox has a brilliant extension architecture. Here are the extensions I find essential.
- Clone Window
- Makes it so that Ctrl-N and Ctrl-T make a copy of the
current page rather than sending you to a blank page. This is
absolutely essential.
- Tweak Network
- Lets you turn on HTTP pipelining.
- TabBrowser Preferences
- Lots of options for configuring tabs. Almost none of them are
useful, but a couple are handy.
- Download Manager Tweak
- Improves Firefox's weird download manager UI.
- Slogger
- Records every web page you ever visited. Annoying for the
popup errors when it can't save a page, but useful. Also a nice
workaround for the lack of Firefox cache support in
Google desktop search.
- googlebar
- Not just for starting searches, but so that you have the quick
find option on your keywords. Shame it can't live next to other
toolbar buttons.
- BugMeNot
- Bypass stupid site registrations.
Many of these tweaks should be in the default install, or
else rolled into a "large install".