Being a blazing fast browser and scalable I have long since made Firefox my default. I admit it wasn’t easy giving up the luscious goodness of Safari but Firefox does take things to the next level if you constantly write HTML and CSS and use Flickr or like Photography⌘ !
There are numerous posts about Firefox Add-ons so why make yet another one? Well, I’d like to make one for the ones I frequently use. They are productivity orientated and work for me and am happy to share it with you.
- Adblock Plus — stops ads, banners & pesky javascript animations
- GreaseMonkey — life changing!! if you use Flickr UserScripts
- Web Developer — web designers stepping stone
- Clear Cache Button — keep it squeaky clean
- Firebug — saves a lot of development time
- HTML Validator — keep you (X)HTML error/warning free
- Link Evaluator — never have broken links again
- IE View — when working on windows
- YSlow — for testing and improving page load time
Great! So lets fire ‘em all up and go browse till the cows come home. Well, you may but this undermines the whole reason why add-ons were made. They are to assist your work not hinder. To aid this process Firefox has an easy turn enable/disable button from Firefox > Tools > Add-ons. Keeping them all activated all the time slows your browser down even on a super-fast new machine. Only keep your must have basic ones activated and disable what you don’t need. There are lots of add-ons out there and newer ones coming out everyday. If you load too many add-ons its bound to slow your browsers performance down! The key is to know what kind of tasks you do most on your browser and have a select few add-ons that make your repetitive tasks quicker and effortless.
If in doubt ask yourself:
- Do I need to know the exact weather around me every second on right in my browser window NOW?
- Do I need to know if every page I browse is HTML complaint to W3C standard ALWAYS?
I’d say NO
As you can tell from the image below how over crowded and distracting the taskbar looks here, imagine if you had this all day long!
A lean and minimal browser will go further a field and achieve more for you than one thats bloated with add-ons and plug-ins and themes!
⌘As of now, October 2009 — Firefox, Safari and Omniweb are the only 3 browsers that represent true image colour profiles. There is not much point in using a browser that doesn’t display colours correctly. Firefox being an OpenSource also has the advantage of thousands of worldwide developers pitching in their best to keep it clean, open architecture and scalable.
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