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".
techgood
  2005-02-03 17:01 Z