Something I had been aware of for ages, but never really experimented with until a few months ago, was the availablility of plugins for Firefox. These little programs (typically less than 100kb) extend firefox in virtually every way you could imagine, from changing the appearance of cursors to adding a fully working FTP client. The whole thing just happens at the click of a button!
Here are a few that I’m using at the moment:
ForecastFox
Puts a little weather forecast in the lower right corner of the screen, I have a pretty minimalist one with just three icons showing the weather for the next three days, but it can be customised up and can even show satellite pictures of your region!:
FireFTP
A fully featured ftp client that fits right inside of firefox. Must usefully it supports directory syncing, so I use it to keep an up to date version of my webpages on my local machine when I’m busy designing
ColorZilla
Web design tool for Firefox, at the click of a button it turns the cursor into a web design probe. This tells you the colour of the pixel you’re currently hovering over, what elements in the page enclose it, what formatting applies and so on. I have found the main use of this to be quickly grabbing colours from webpages to use in my own designs.
IE View
For some mysterious reason there are still a few websites that say “Sorry you must use Internet Explorer X.XX or later to view this site!”. This plugin adds a simple right click option to make it easy to flick over to IE at a moment’s notice. Also useful for checking that webpages work in IE.
Fission
Fission combines address bar and progress bar (Safari style). I think it looks a lot nicer
Adblock
Pretty much essential. Blocks images based on regular expressions you supply to it. I don’t even remember the last time I saw an advert! Better yet adblock automatically keeps itself up to date so new advertising companies are blocked before I even know they exist!
—–
