Turbo-Charge Firefox

What’s the greatest feature of Firefox? Tabbed-browsing? Pop-up blocking? Safe and secure browsing? Skins? Nay, says the PC. It’s all of the stuff you can add to it!

Firefox is open source, and anybody can make an extension to it. There are 593 of them on mozilla.org, and lots more floating around. Here are some of the PC’s favorites:

• Adblock: This ubiquitous extension lets you block anything - banner adds, scripts, flash. It’s amazing how much space you’ll get back from a web page when you eliminate all the advertisements. Once you adblock an advertising server, you won’t see their stuff again. Ever.
• Sage: RSS feed reader. Firefox has RSS built in, but Sage is much nicer.
• Forecastfox: Weather on your status bar, with pop-up radar and severe weather warnings.
• Web Developer: A must have. Too many features to list. Makes web development and troubleshooting much easier.
• Colorzilla: Use an eyedropper to pick any pixel on a web page and copy the RGB or hex color. Great for getting color schemes.
• IE View: Sometimes you just gotta pull up a site in IE. Adds that function to the right-click menu.
• Copy Plain Text: Ever copy text from a web page, paste it somewhere and get a lot of html tags? This lets you get unformatted text.
• Greasemonkey: Make web pages do anything. Hundreds of scripts to download or make your own. My favorite, book burro, shows me the price of a book on several different web sites when I view the book on Amazon, B&N, Buy.com, and others.
• Scrapbook: Save web pages in their entirety, and search and view them later.