Useful Addons

Every Mozilla/Thunderbird-user knows addons.mozilla.org. But good extensions are rare. And only SOME of the addons are useful. And for our daily work we need only good and useful extensions.

In the winter holidays I’ve had time to look at many addons. And found some things, which might be useful for our daily work. Maybe you will have a look at them.

Reasons for writing

As my colleague just said: Not another page with firefox extensions. That’s right, but my aim was to make those extensions searchable. When you surf on addons.mozilla.org, you will not find the listed extensions so fast.

I searched in particular for every currently unknown extensions. You can do this yourself by using this link. This searches for all Firefox extensions from version 3.0 onwards.

Extension List Dumper

The first addon is one of those, which is makes it easy to write articles like this. :) The extension list dumper prints simply all your installed addons in different formats. I used it to generate this list of addons. It’s also very practical to exchange your list of addons with those of your friends or colleagues.

Hint: I mention this, because I searched for some minutes: The button to start this addon is in the addon-window at the bottom!

http://sogame.awardspace.com/

Dictionary Switcher

Simple and it does exactly what the name suggest: It switches the inbuilt dictionary. I have to write in English and German and this addons saves me time.

Hint: This addon is also available for Thunderbird! (You have to install some dictionaries beforehand, of course)

http://design-noir.de/mozilla/dictionary-switcher/

Lazarus: Form Recovery

Have you ever entered a form, and when you submitted, the session has run out? This is one of those tools that can safe your day! It’s also useful for developing, if you have to fill out long forms over and over. Two clicks and your form is completely filled up!

VERY USEFUL!

http://lazarus.interclue.com/

iMacros

I use that extension for repeating tasks. For example when I want to logout in my test application, I have to click three times. With iMacros this saves me much time and possible errors.

Don’t mix this up with the Selenium extension! Selenium is for professional testing of websites, iMarcos is for practical daily work. This may cover also testing.

http://www.iopus.com/imacros/firefox

Fission

Fission combines address bar and progress bar – Safari style. I like to see the progress on top of window and not on bottom and it helps to notice errors in the URL.

Hint: A web-developer should always look at the URL first. :)

http://mozilla.zeniko.ch/fission.html

Interclue

Some will say: This is awful. Others will say: Wow, this is what I needed. In my eyes, Interclue is useful, if you are surfing on sites, which have typical article structures, like „headline“ -> „article“. I use it for example on Golem or tvtv.

Interclue saves you clicks and tabs and it presents the article in a context that is not crowed with sidebars etc. Use this for your daily lecture.

You can turn interclue off site wise and you should do, because it can be annoying on some pages. It needs some time to get used to that. It’s not very useful for developing, it’s just a tool for faster surfing.

http://interclue.com/

Other stuff

Just to present a complete list, besides these I use the following well-known and useful extensions: Adblock Plus, Ctrl-Tab, Firebug, GooglePreview, Html Validator, Live HTTP Headers, Locationbar², NoScript (a must!), Screen grab, Selenium, Speed Dial, Taboo and many other stuff. Just for completeness.