Top 5 Firefox Add-ons

I’ve been using Firefox for quite some time now after becoming upset by the way IE was treating me. One of the huge factors that drew me to Firefox was the ability to customize my experience via add-ons (themes and extensions). The number of features Firefox has compared to Internet Explorer are huge and my personal switch to Firefox was incredibly easy. The add-ons are what make this transition easy. And with many different add-ons to choose from, I struggled to narrowed my list down to five add-ons. But after much thought, I constructed the following list of my top Firefox add-ons.

Forcast Fox

Forecast Fox is one of my all time favorite Firefox Add-ons. It delivers my weather to my browser via my zip code and updates itself about every 15 minutes to show me the current conditions in my area and the conditions for the future (the next few days). The future forecast is not what draws me to this extension but it’s the ability to produce live radar of my area. And with another add-on, the radar can be huge. Many Firefox users have complained that this extension takes a lot out of a system, but I disagree. If you use a standard DSL line, I am sure that this extension will work as expected.

Tab Mix Plus

Tab Mix Plus is also one of my favorite Firefox add-ons. This add-on gives users the power to change the way tabs are created, what windows becomes a tab, and how tabs are displayed. This extension also allows the option of creating multiple rows of tabs (in theory, this exertion can allow for an infinite amount of tabs). Since the big ‘tab boom’ last year created a tab dependency for computer users, I believe this extension is necessary for the new Internet Browser of the year 2008.

FasterFox

FasterFox is an awesome add-on. This extension eliminates the unnecessary elements of a web page, decreasing the time it takes for web pages to load. Plus, FastFox records the exact time it takes for websites to load and displays the time in the bottom of the browser. “Captain, how long did that one take?” Mine says 0.140 seconds.

DownThemAll

BOOM! Favorite extension. DownThemAll is a download accelerator and allows for the download of any mp3, jpg, or movie file of a web page. Being in such a media based world, this extension takes the cake on usefulness. One of my favorite things to do is to extract music from websites to use for personal use (mp3 player). This can be done by navigating to a site, click on tools>DownThemAll and then select the exact file you want to download. It’s that simple.

AeroFox

Okay, so this one is not an extension, but it does fall under the add-ons category. This add-on is really called a theme and changes the ‘skin’ or look of the Firefox browser. Downloading the AeroFox theme makes the browser have a sexy black look to it. Woho…kinda looks like Vista…Though this theme looks like Vista, it does not slow down your system like the infamous operating system.