Rants of a Mad Programmer

Last week I upgraded for the latest and greatest from the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox 3.  Oveall I’ve been very impressed with the increase in the loading speed.  Before 3 it would take a good 20 to 30 seconds to load and now it’s down to about 10 to 15.  As far as the browsing experience goes, I have noticed that it’s a little more snappy than the 2 series so it’s a good thing.

So to add to this, I though I would list out some of my favorite Firefox extensions.  Some of these are good for everyone, some are mainly for web developers.

• All-in-One Sidebar - This add-on merges several Firefox option windows into a easy to access sidebar, things like Bookmarks, History, and Add-ons now just pop open on the side instead of in a window.
• BugMeNot - This is a goodie if you visit a site that requires you to do a free registration to read a simple article.  It usualy has entries for smaller sites too like local news papers.
• ColorfulTabs - This one makes all of your tabs different colors.  I find that it makes the tab bar more “glanceable” to go where you need.
• Extended Statusbar - This one is for webdevelopers and uptight surfers.  It adds 4 panels to the status bar that gives you progress and statistics on your page load.
• Firebug - This is the big daddy of web debugging tools.  Pop this add-on open and the entire page is there for you to examine, debug, tweak and adjust in realtime.
• ForcastFox - Adds the current weather and links to sat and radar maps to your status bar.
• Google Toolbar - Access your favoite search engine and many of it’s features from one toolbar.
• IE Tab - This allows you to switch a tab in Firefox from the Mozilla engine to the IE engine.  Good for IE only sites.  It also allows you to setup rules to switch for sites automaticly.
• Image Zoom - This is a great tool for images on web sites.  You can hold down your right mouse button on a image and roll your scroll wheel to zoom or unzoom a image.
• PicLens - Another good image tool.  This one is for searching images or YouTube.  It uses a very visual and fast method for browsing your results. Check it out.
• ScrapBook - This one allows you to save entire pages, images and all, then go back and highlight and clip them.  It’s great for keeping things for research or reference purposes.
• Tab Mix Plus - Currently in beta for Firefox 3, so you have to get a development build. This is the ultimate tab and session tweaking tool for Firefox.

Now you know why it took 30 seconds to load Firefox 2.