I recently found myself using Safari, Apple’s web browser, quite often, because it’s WAY faster than Firefox in both rendering and starting up.

But, issues with Wordpress’ post editor aside, I came back to Firefox for one simple reason. Addons.

I use a lot of Addons for Firefox. Some in order to gain functionalities, some to tweak websites the way I want. For example, my Gmail, with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts, has a few extra buttons and menus that I ended up consider part of Gmail itself. And missed on Safari!

So I’ve decided to prune some unused extensions and keep only what I felt really important. Here’s what I kept, in no particular order:

  • Adblock: controversial addon that filters ads from web pages. Not that I’m particularly happy about depriving the pages I visit of their source of income, but some flashy ads are terrible. It’s very configurable so you can “switch off” only that pesky banner that has been bugging you. I also use Adblock to avoid loading the Shinystat counter on Signal Eleven, so I don’t get counted (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! ;-) )

  • Greasemonkey: allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using JavaScript scripts. There are scripts for a lot of websites. For example, a script for hiding “related videos” “director videos” and “comments” on youtube. Sure you can have them appear anytime, but not having the temptation of clicking on a “related video” is going to save you hours :-). Important: you don’t need to know JavaScript! Plenty of scripts here.

  • BBCodeXtra: this adds a few context-menu options to quickly enter BBcode and Html in a web form. Handy if you happen to write on an online forum, like I do.

  • Better Gmail: this extension adds over 25 additional features to gmail. Mostly Greasemonkey scripts, useful stuff like a “mark as (un)read” button, options to hide the spam count (it is a source of distraction for me. Gives me those extra seconds of procrastination), or to hide the invite box. Adds a search for date, save searches you make often etc… The italian version (you get it if you have Firefox in italian) has a couple of misleading translations. My fault, I’m going to fix it when a new version comes out.(Lifehacker)

  • Better Gcal: same as better gmail, but for Google Calendar. It allows to collapse the header (where the gcal logo and the search box are) and the sidebar, wraps the text on full day events making them actually readable. You can obtain the same functionalities by installing the appropriate Greasemonkey scripts

  • Foxyproxy: if you, like me, are a mobile user, and find yourself using your laptop in different areas such as university, workplace, home, cafes, etc. this is probably going to be useful. It’s basically a proxy configuration switcher, allowing you to change the desired proxy from a list, but it’s even more powerful, allowing you to define which proxy to use (or none) based on regular expressions, url patterns, and so on. Useful if you’re setting up a proxy and need testing, or need to access some pages directly.

Believe it or not, I’ve got more extensions to promote, some goodies for digital-divided users. But I’m going to save those for another post. Until then…

Stay tuned, more to come.

Share This