July 3rd, 2008 in Technology

4 Firefox Add-Ons to Ease Your Online Life

I’ve experienced 100s of Firefox add-ons, and have whittled them down to about two dozen I use on a regular basis — even out of these, I have favorites. Here are 4 I find both casually enjoyable and sheerly indispensable; I hope they add value to your browsing. Even if you’ve heard of them before, I share specific reasons why they’re so useful + fun (usefun!). All are compatible with the wonderful Firefox 3:

DownloadHelper

Ever wanted to download Flash videos from YouTube or another site and found yourself frustrated by sluggish web conversion utilities?

This add-on keeps rocketing in popularity, and with good reason: it simplifies the process of downloading multimedia with a couple clicks. It can be as easy as opening a movie-playing page, clicking the toolbar icon, and selecting the file to download. Moments later, it’ll be on your hard drive.

The interface is a bit odd at first, but once you get up to speed, it’s a breeze. I use this for archiving FLV copies of videos I’ve created — please don’t do bad things with it.

Picnik

Picnik has saved me a tremendous amount of time by removing wasteful steps in my workflow. This add-on provides an easy path to visually send a webpage into my fave online Picnik image editor (many features are free) so it can be cropped and edited with delicious effects, then posted on your blog, Flickr, another photo-sharing site, or even saved back to your hard drive. For that reason alone, it has a halo appeal for bloggers who need webpage screenshots… fast!

Before, I suffered with saving screen captures to disk, then Photoshopping them because most lesser editors are too limited on the tasty eye candy. But Picnik has a fine balance of both, and enables the process to take place totally online.

Alas, the Picnik add-on can’t capture your web browser or other apps’ user interface; you’ll still need a utility like Gadwin Printscreen (free) or SnagIt for that.

ScrapBook

Perhaps you desire to capture a webpage’s appearance, not as a static image but as an annotable file? ScrapBook will do that and more for you: it can cache whole webpages or parts of them for later review, then you can add notes and sort your clippings into folders.

This is terribly handy if you’re on a laptop and want to save some offline reading material for when you get on a plane or train.

There’s lots of excellent note-taking assistants like EverNote out there, but ScrapBook integrates extremely well into Firefox.

Tree Style Tab

Arguably, I may’ve saved the best and most un-obvious for last. Tabs are a fundamental and common feature in every popular web browser, but they’re often positioned horizontally. If you’re a frequent tabber, instead of messing around with proportionally-shrinking or even multi-row horizontal tabs, wouldn’t you like to be able to have a long list of vertical tabs? Even better, you can expand/collapse these into trees, change the width of their titles on-the-fly (or lock the width), and tweak the nitty-gritty details. Also, on the rare occasion should you want to revert to horizontal tabs, Tree Style Tab gives you that power too.

Once I transitioned to vertical tabs, I never looked back: vertical tabs are far easier to manage and sort, exponentially boosting my effectiveness and allowing me to make far more use of Firefox’s “Open All in Tabs”, since the tree-view helps keep clutter down.

Are you skeptical? Think of how long info-lists like menus, phone numbers, and spreadsheets are organized: vertically. Then dive in, for Tree Style Tab is even more tasty with the popular Tab Mix Plus.

Here’s a raw shot of my vertical tabs before being Picnicked as shown above, but there’s no better way to understand than to experience this joy yourself — click for full-size:

WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY

Torley

Torley amplifies your awesome with the useful and fun.

ARTICLES BY THIS WRITER »
Don't want to miss any related posts like there? Subscribe to our feed!

24 Responses

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

Comments

  • Devon says on July 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    I can’t live without the Sharaholic Add-On. It makes it so easy to bookmark things in a central location, so I can use any computer later and still access my bookmarks.

  • Sarah says on July 3rd, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    Thanks for this; I’m going to try Tree Style Tab. Vertical tabs is one reason why I bought OmniWeb browser for Mac OS X. I agree, vertical tabs are much easier to work with!

  • Peter says on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    For a bit of a twist on DownloadHelper check out http://watchmelater.com it is a Firefox extension that lets you watch any online video later without having to download it. It includes some cool features like maximized playback and it will even automatically bookmark your place in YouTube videos.

  • Torley says on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    @Devon: I’m going to check that out! I haven’t found a bookmark-sync’er I’ve been really satisfied with, so I keep my eyes open to possibility.

    @Sarah: You’re totally welcome! I haven’t used OmniWeb in years, but once I got hooked on vertical tabs, I just… couldn’t… go… back!

  • DeadNed says on July 4th, 2008 at 4:57 am

    tree style tabs are okay, but i’m pretty use to the horizontal tabs. To stop them from changing sizes on me, I go to about:config and change tabMinWidth and tabMaxWidth to similar values. works like a charm.

    A really helpful firefox extension (for me) is AdBlock Plus, it filters out many of the annoying flash based adverts.

  • Mel says on July 4th, 2008 at 8:26 am

    @Devon – Thanks loads for that tip! My bookmarks tend to occasionally just disappear for no reason, so having them somewhere central should help!

  • Alan Bamboo says on July 4th, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    I love Picnik,
    Actually I sign in to flickr first then just edit photo automatically through picnic.

    I just wish we could add text to photos, but other than that it does all the basic things I need “fast and efficient”, no learning curve

  • Torley Lives says on July 4th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

    @DeadNed: I can totally relate (and agree) about blocking ads — intrusive, unwanted advertising is one of the ugliest social elephants which wastes time, energy, money, etc. More companies should turn to innovative, permissions-based marketing which is WANTED and ASKED FOR.

    @Alan: I use Flickr’s Edit Photo too!

    And Picnik *does* have a basic text editor if you look in the Create section — you can rotate, tint, and choose from a lot of fun fonts. Alas, Picnik’s filter effects don’t affect text, but I submitted a feature wish. :o)

  • Chris Davis says on July 8th, 2008 at 2:42 am

    I love Tree Style Tab. I had wanted something like it for years, but I suck at programming. Imagine my delight when it finally came out!

    Another good one is “Read it Later”, which allows you to reserve links like news articles for another viewing time, without cluttering up your bookmarks folder. It also lets you sync said bookmarks to a number of different bookmarking/social news services.

  • Pranav says on July 8th, 2008 at 8:20 am

    Now these are something different from the usual list… Thanks!

  • Torley Lives says on July 8th, 2008 at 9:40 am

    @Chris: I’ve been trying several “read it later”-esque tools, like the Readbag add-on (sort of a companion site to the crazy popular Popurls.com). I reasoned to myself that it’d save bookmark folder clutter too, but amidst my natural tendencies, I’m still bookmarking various stuff for when I have more time — what looks appealing about Read It Later is that it doesn’t have an intermediary step that’d weigh me down. I’ll check it out, thanks!

    @Pranav: You’re most welcome! :D

  • Welcome to Paradise says on July 16th, 2008 at 11:35 pm

    Picnik is quite cool.

  • Michael Valiant says on July 21st, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    I just downloaded the tab Mix Plus addon so I could try out a tree style tab… but it doesn’t have the option. The positions offered are only ‘Top & bottom’…

    maybe it isn’t working for the new version of Firefox yet?

  • Michael Valiant says on July 21st, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    -ack!- Never mind… That’s what I get for scanning and not reading…

    I’ve DL’d both Tree Style and Tab Mix Plus…

    thanks!

  • Jass Kulaar says on June 28th, 2009 at 7:51 am

    Nice article, Very helpful. Two add-ons which i suggest are
    1.AutoPager automatically loads next pages when you reach the end of a page. It works on a ton of sites,Google,Yahoo
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925
    2.GooglePreview: Inserts preview images (thumbnails) and popularity ranks of web sites into the Google and Yahoo search results page
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/189

  • sms says on November 10th, 2009 at 8:53 am

    I love Picnik,
    Actually I sign in to flickr first then just edit photo automatically through picnic.

    I just wish we could add text to photos, but other than that it does all the basic things I need “fast and efficient”, no learning curve

Post your comment

Continue your discussions at Lifehack Community.

Get your own Avatars at Gravatars.
Three FREE Audiobooks RISK-FREE from Audible
Recent Writers SEE MORE
Latest Poll

Do you like the new design?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...