This is a list of my “must-have” Mozilla Firefox add-ons. If you can recommend anything similar or better, be sure to drop me a comment.
Page Analysis & SEO
Minimise Nuisance
Bookmark Management
Download Management
Productivity
Web Development & Design
Security
Functional Extensions
Tab Management
Add-Ons Management
Page Analysis & SEO
About This Site Bookmarks – right-click on a page, select “About This Site Bookmarks” and you will see a list of handy links pointing off to informational sites such as Alexa, Compete, Netcraft, del.icio.us, etc.
Minimising Nuisance
Bookmark Management
Download Management
Download Statusbar – manage your downloads via the Firefox status bar.
DownThemAll – conveniently download all link targets on a page.
FlashGot – allows for single and multiple downloads utilising an external download manager of your choice (I prefer FlashGet).
Productivity
Auto Copy – highlight a piece of text and the selection is automatically copied to your clipboard.
FoxClocks – displays local times around the world in the statusbar or toolbar. Great for if you are dealing with friends and colleagues across multiple timezones.
FoxyTunes – operate your currently running media player from your Firefox statusbar.
Google Notebook – conveniently clip text and links to your Google Notebook.
Linkification – Converts text links (including e-mail addresses) into clickable links.
Web Development & Design
ColorZilla – eye-dropper tool that allows you to pick the HEX & RGB values of colours of elements on the page.
Firebug – the quintessential Javascript debugger. It also allows for excellent DOM and CSS debugging and manipulation.
IE View – open the current page in an IE window.
Live HTTP Headers – view HTTP request and response headers in realtime.
User Agent Switcher – allows you to spoof the User-Agent string and have Firefox masquerade as the Googlebot, etc, to see how your site reacts to different user-agents.
View Source Chart – renders page source HTML in an easy-to-read manner.
Web Developer – a must for the serious web developer.
YSlow – an addon to the Firebug debugger. It allows you to profile a page and identify bottlenecks. Provided by Yahoo. Also see Yahoo’s articles on improving page load performance.
Security
McAfee SiteAdvisor – lets you know if the currently viewed site is considered “safe” or not.
Functionality Extensions
CustomizeGoogle – customize your Google search and application experiences.
ErrorZilla – extends the standard page not found error screen with convenient links such as access to the page’s Google cached copy.
Tab Management
Faviconize Tab – minimize a tab’s width to the width of the favicon.
Add-Ons Management
FEBE – a convenient extensions & settings backup tool. Allows you to also run scheduled backups. The backups can be used to transport your extensions and their settings to another machine or Firefox profile.
MR Tech Local Install – install power tools for add-ons