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Web 2.0 News
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| 5 Firefox extensions you can't live without |
| Thursday, August 10, 2006 |
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| In Category: Articles |
| Comment(s): 63 |
| Views: 154787 |
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There was a time when using a Web Browser was a painful experience. And then, along came a revolution that was called Firefox.
Rooted deep within the open source movement, for the first time, a web browser that could easily be customized to do anything anyone wanted to, was available. It was fast, it was stable, it picked up momentum and the magical moment soon arrived when the world started talking about how this browser could (and soon, would) challenge Microsoft's dominance in the web browser market.
The best measure of success for an open source project is the amount of modules or customizations that are available for it.
And Firefox is no exception. Quite the contrary, in fact. There are so many plugins that are currently available for Firefox that the mind boggles. A lot of the new web 2.0 sites today provide custom Firefox extensions that enhance functionality to a point that not having a properly configured Firefox browser is a distinct disadvantage.
The NEO Binaries team almost exclusively uses Firefox to surf the new web. We decided to present the 5 most critical extensions that we think are a requirement to use Firefox the way it was meant to be.
So here they are, our selection for the five Firefox extensions that you really can't live without:
All-In-One Sidebar
A Sidebar beside you... stuff within
One of the first extensions that should be installed on every fresh Firefox installation, I think All-In-One-Sidebar, or AiOS as the developer (eXXile.net) calls it, is one of the most essential extensions for Firefox.
Why?
The primary reason that I use All-In-One Sidebar is because it takes away most, if not all, the modal-ness of Firefox. Hang on, hang on, I know I said that I wouldn't get technical, but this is worth figuring out.
 Most rich-interfaces today pop-up a dialog window to let you configure them or perform non-critical actions. The problem is that most of these dialog windows are modal - you cannot use the application until you "Ok" or "Cancel" them. Or even if you can (that's called modeless), you continuously have to switch windows in your Windows Taskbar while you refer to each one of them. This problem becomes more acute when you want to read a web page while you watch your downloads complete, for example.
All-In-One Sidebar (I'm going to call it AiOS too from now on) solves this by neatly hiding away the stuff from a lot of different windows in a single side bar on the left (or the right, optionally) inside your Firefox. You can make the Sidebar visible by hovering over the left edge of your screen and clicking on the edge. Clicking on the edge again hides AiOS again.
How?
 AiOS opens your Bookmarks, History, Downloads, Extensions, Themes (and some other some other windows which not many people use) within itself. Each side bar panel is also available by a shortcut key so that you can quickly pop out the side bar with just one keyboard combination. You can open the Downloads panel by pressing Ctrl + Shift + D for example.
The Extensions panel (Ctrl + Shift + E on the keyboard) is one of the most useful panels available. You can see which extension has an update available, and configure the extension by right-clicking on it and selecting the approp riate menu item. You can disable / enable any extension from the popup menu too, but this still requires a restart of Firefox.
Bookmarks couldn't have been more conveniently placed. You can quickly scroll through your bookmarks and select which one you want to open. The sidebar stays open after you click on a bookmark link, so you can open your favorite bookmarks one by one.
There are a whole lot of other features, including integration by other extensions like Sage, Scrapbook, etc. which I won't go into right now.
 Where?
The All-In-One Sidebar Firefox extension is available for download from the Firefox addons site.
The developer site contains more screenshots and is a good resource for advanced configurations etc.
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:03 PM
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Great article. Another one I use a lot is the new tab homepage. It just opens every new tab to the homepage I specify. Maybe that is a feature of Tab Mix Plus too, I am not sure. |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:05 PM
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There are another five that I always install on each new PC:
Flashblock - replaces flash objects with a button you can click to view them (helps with ads)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/
Adblock - filters ads from web-pages
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/10/
Download Manager Tweak - able to have the download manager use a new tab instead of opening a pop-up window
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/256/
IE tab - enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Mozilla/Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/
Search Engine Ordering - enables you to change the order (and delete) of the search engines in the search bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2164/
enjoy!
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:08 PM
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https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/26/ is a great util for downloads, it stops that download popup window from appearing and simply shows them in a status bar at the bottom of your current browser window. Its always the first extension I remember to download. |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:13 PM
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The link at the bottom of the page is wrong, the location of tab mix plus is:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1122/ |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:41 PM
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Scott: Thanks for pointing out the link-typo; I'd mistakenly pointed to the Fasterfox extension again, instead of Tab Mix plus - this is now fixed.
CBAR, and Alex, thanks for contributing the links, I'm sure we'll check them out as well. |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:51 PM
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Brilliant Stuff! But, i wanted to know... What about flickrfox??? Isn't that a wunnerful extension as well ? ? ? |
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Blog of Trash: Firefox extention article
5 Firefox extensions you can't live without > NEO Binaries: The online resource to Web based applications. Listings, reviews, news, articles and the first web2.0 community > NEO Binaries: Hottest and Latest news on web2.0, web based applications, la
on Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 10:56 PM
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 11:01 PM
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What's the name of that Windows theme used in the screenshots? |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 11:11 PM
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Ah yes..... the Windows theme.
That's courtesy Danilloc (http://danilloc.wincustomize.com) maker of the fine theme Aerial (which I use here) for WindowBlinds.
For the rest of you who'd like to make your Firefox look *really* different, check out Apurva's super-great guide on desktop customization and skinning at ( http://www.apurva.com/Articles/AGuidetoDesktopCustomization/tabid/64/Default.aspx )
Thank either from me, if you like it too. :) |
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uZable - UI Enhancements: Power FireFox
on Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 11:20 PM
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Dhiraj Gupta: A shameless self-plug
on Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 11:27 PM
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 12:22 AM
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"Turbo mode" of fasterfox is quite rude to use on high volume servers and can even get your IP address autobanned by some Apache servers. Be very careful using it. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 1:15 AM
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Mike:
Rude? Yes. Oh, definitely.
But I think the site owners of these Apache server should reconsider their customer retention policy.
Yes. Your visitors are your customers. *Not* someone you should ban.
Banning an IP address is a good way to lose a customer permanently. But do-you-really- WANT that?
Well? Do you? |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 1:53 AM
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What window decoration are you using in those screen shots? I like it, I'd like to snag that if you let me know where I can find it. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 2:01 AM
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How did you combine your firefox buttons and drop down menus on the same line? I really like that, but I can't figure out how to do it .
Nice article, btw... |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 2:15 AM
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What about GooglePreview? |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 2:25 AM
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Wow. This article is shocking because most, if not all, of that functionality is built directly into Opera already.
I'm not dissing Firefox, I just like Opera. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 2:29 AM
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tabmix plus is definitely my all-time favorite.
a recent love is the Diigo extension -- really the swiss army knife for online research -- killer feature set. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 3:38 AM
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good choice , I was tired of saving long articles in order to read them later
:) |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 4:17 AM
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Victor: You have do it in Firefox's customize toolbar window.
Right click on an empty area in the standard toolbar. Then click Customize. From here drag whatever you want on to the Menu bar. It should work.
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 4:33 AM
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Why do you have session manager, when TabMixPlus already does all of its tasks?
If I get to sub in an extension, I'd include ConQuery- it makes websearching one step easier. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 7:08 AM
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For my money, the best are:
1. forecastfox - small current weather icon
2. showIP - shows ip of site you are on
3. colorzilla - find hex value of any color on screen
4. web developer - so many cool thing; my favs are resizing screen, showing page without image, showing css, all great stuff
5. gmail manager - keeps track of all my gmail accounts and let me know when new mail comes in
and I also like 6. colorful tabs (although I could live without it if I needed to)
I love love love all of these. And you can get them all off the firefox site. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 7:13 AM
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I'm curious it seems like the scrapbook extension does the same thing as the Google Notebook, only the Google Notebook is stored on my Google account and consequently accessible via multiple computers. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 8:34 AM
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Wow, those were completely different from the extensions I can't live without.
For me, they are:
- Smartsearch (configurable context-menu searching from your Quicksearch bookmarks)
- Adblock Plus
- Reveal (just incredibly cool... the zooming is useful, the "display all tabs", and the screenshot-tooltips for the Back/Forward buttons are all things you learn to love.)
- IETab .. the best of both worlds. This is sometimes a little buggy, but it is incredibly useful on some IE only sites. It works wonders in Outlook Web Access, which many corporate e-mail users depend on.
- BugMeNot extension ... this is a great little extension for bypassing annoying free registration on sites that have no need to have registration. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 11:49 AM
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I use most of those mentioned, but wanted to bring up three more:
SuperDragAndGo - like flinging links
EasyGestures - Circular context menus make it Easy on the mouse and wrist
BBCode - if you spend any time at all posting on forums |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 11:50 AM
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Try out Web-Marker , it works similar to ScrapBook and Diigo , instead of using a central server to maintain your "annotations", it gives you a link which you can share or bookmark.
http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2679/ |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 12:09 PM
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They you very much! I'm definitely going to try session manager and maybe tab mix too.
But might I suggest NoScript be on the list? I think it is a necessity. Users need control over which websites can run scripts on their machine. Also I like Adblock to get rid of annoying ads on sites I frequent. And All-in-One Gestures is REALLY good. After using it, other browsers seems sooooo slow and clumbsy! |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 1:34 PM
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I would like KeyConfig plugin in the list. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 1:56 PM
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I recommend NoScript and Gmail Notifier. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 5:29 PM
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Why recommend Session Manager AND Tab Mix Plus? Since Tab Mix Plus can do all that Session Manager can do and much more.. No reason to have two extensions doing the same thing, is there??
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 6:12 PM
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Thanks for sharing this. Always wondered what some of these extensions are doing exactly but always was too lazy too find out myself :). |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 6:34 PM
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A great list of extensions, some of which I hadn't heard of but will certainly be using from now on. A couple of other for consideration; Web Developer, which has already been mentioned is an absolute essential and how about Gmail Space https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1593/ which allows you to use your Gmail account as storage. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 10:25 PM
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I haven't read the comments so I'm not sure if this has been pointed out, but personally I find that this is an awful 'most have' list. I agree on 2 of the extensions, scrapbook and tab mix plus. Actually scrapbook isn't a must have, but it's really neat regardless.
Adblock Plus and Adblock Filterset.G have to be the #1 and #2 must-have extensions, followed by tab-mix plus. Any top 5 extension list that doesn't include those is incomplete. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 10:47 PM
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Have you ever heared about Google Notebook? It's like scrapbook but stores everything on server side. For free. |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 at 11:38 PM
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on the contrary... SyncNotes.com (covered in the featured products on the homepage of this site), is a way better tool than Google Notebook. |
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| Saturday, August 12, 2006 at 12:38 AM
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Congrats for the article, Firefox extensions are an endlessly disscussed subject and I think it's nice to hear, like for Social Bookmarks what poeple like.
me, it's
Greasemonkey,
'add bookmark here',
'update bookmark'
and flat bookmark editing'
which are features I think could be default, but everybody want's their extension default. |
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| Saturday, August 12, 2006 at 4:20 AM
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Jeteye.com is a server based implementation of the Scrapbook functionality, plus it enables collaboration. it also has a much better user interface. |
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| Sunday, August 13, 2006 at 11:52 AM
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I am sorry my friend Dhiraj because you are wrong in this one, because there is not any necessity to install the extension "Session Manager", because when one installs the extension "Tab Mix Plus" this already has a session manager integrated, and already this proven that this it is much better than the own one "Session Manager" for if alone.
I believe that the best thing you can do is to make the tests that I tell you and you will realize that until the own integration of the Session Manager inside the "Tab Mix Plus" it is much better than having to install 2 extensions when one already has a better one and with everything included.
Thank you.
I request you that you reread these comments again so that you realize that I am not mistaken, there are also other people that agree with me, like they are:
-Flameproof
-Jonah
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| Sunday, August 13, 2006 at 6:05 PM
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Hmm.... Flameproof, Jonah and Hector interestingly you guys seem to be right.
Ok, confession, I've been using Tab Mix Plus as well as Session Manager for so long that the boundaries between the two had pretty much blurred for me.
More recently (after all your comments) I've had the opportunity to realize that Tab Mix Plus has incorporated (pretty much) all the features that were present in Session Manager. You can save named Sessions and Tab Mix Plus does crash protection as well.
I've not really tested the stability of the Session Manager (it has the same name!) that is present inside Tab Mix Plus but I can only assume that it works, just like everything else that is in it.
Thanks for the informed updates, guys.
Keep on rockin'
-Dhiraj |
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| Monday, August 14, 2006 at 5:54 PM
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Probably the best "extensions that you must have" article that I've ever read. It even made me reconsider my own list (thanks for that!).
Here's mine:
AdBlock
IETab
IEZoom
ReminderFox
FasterFox |
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| Monday, August 14, 2006 at 7:32 PM
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adblock - no adverts
url link - for unlinked texts (like in these comments)
copy plain text - speaks for itself
sztaki dictionary (free hun-eng, eng hun dictionary)
these are on even in my workplace.
at home:
trashmail - for signing in to untrusted places
noscript - safer browsing |
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| Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 10:16 AM
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nonone mentioned foxy tunes? Its not the most useful, but it certainly beats alt tabbing out to WMP, Creative or I tunes |
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| Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 1:15 PM
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Keep 'em coming guys, I'm compiling a list of recommended plugins - I'll try them all out and (hopefully) come out with another article detailing them.
This is turning out to be quite a long list now. :) |
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| Friday, August 18, 2006 at 1:50 AM
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I wish i didnt have to part form firefox beta 2 to use this.
: (
=> http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0b1/ |
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| Saturday, August 19, 2006 at 2:33 AM
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fails for no adblock |
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| Monday, August 21, 2006 at 9:05 AM
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blueorganizer from adaptiveblue:
http://www.adaptiveblue.com |
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| Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 1:31 AM
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I installed Tab Mix Plus, but I already had Tabbrowser Preferences. Do they interfere with each other? |
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| Monday, August 28, 2006 at 5:33 PM
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hfsdjfkjskdjf |
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| Monday, September 04, 2006 at 9:35 PM
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Some of my favorite extensions:
Too Many Tabs:
- puts a scrollbar under the tabs so you can scroll through them
Stylish:
- install userchrome styles, all styles are listed in a sidebar with the option of disabling them.
Custom Buttons:
- create your own custom buttons, or use the ready made ones at
http://custombuttons.phpbbnow.com/
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| Monday, September 04, 2006 at 9:48 PM
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Forgot to mention - styles can be installed for Stylish at userstyles.org |
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| Monday, September 11, 2006 at 10:11 PM
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stumble upon : lets you use a simple button on the toolbar to browse webpages tagged by others. you can use filters to narrow down your topics(tags) of interest or simply keep clicking the button to get random webpages tagged by other members of the Stumble upon community.
I cant tell you how many hours I have wasted just clicking that button. :)
addictive stuff. |
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| Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 4:18 PM
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