More essential add-ons for Firefox

[cupidsbow]

I finally have my new computer -- OMG YAY -- which is very shiny and very fast, but is also driving me spare. I'd forgotten how much tweaking I'd done to the old one over the years. I keep going to do things, like a word count on a web page, or adding something to Read-it-Later, and can't. Because the add-on isn't installed yet. Who knew I used so much stuff?!

Plus, this operating system (Windows 7 Ultimate -- which wins the most pretentious name award for 2010) seems to be super-strict and I haven't found all the controls yet to turn the most stupid parts off. At least I assume it's the OS, and not this version of Firefox (3.6). For instance, pop-up boxes for bookmarking on Diigo are this horrible, fixed square that can't be enlarged, and so they cut off half the text entry area.

But I say "HA!" to that (imagine a karate kick with that "HA!"). Because I have downloaded and installed a fixit. I rock!

Anyway, today's post is an update on Must-Have FireFox Applets and Other Useful Stuff, which I posted ages ago. That still has most of the essentials, but there are some new and nifty things I've added to my must-have list since then. You will find them below the cut.

(The usual disclaimers apply -- I can't guarantee these are safe; make sure you have a good virus scanner installed, etc.)



Add-ons for Firefox

• Diigo Toolbar, which I use combined with Delicious. Together they are more than the sum of their parts, and I can do all sorts of neat stuff. (Once installed, I go into Toolbar Options/Keyboard and then set up hotkeys so I can bookmark lickety split.)
  
  
• Brief -- an RSS reader. It's just standard, but I like it.
  
  
• Adblock Plus -- just what it sounds like; kills most ads, so you don't have things flashing in your eyes all the time.
  
  
• After the Deadline -- a spellchecker.
  
  
• Web Developer -- an extra menu which lets you do all sorts of neat things (eg. turn off cookies, precisely resize the window, etc). It's designed for web developers. I have it installed but with the toolbar not showing, and when I get annoyed with something I go in and look to see if the menus there have a fix.

Greasemonkey

• Greasemonkey -- allows you to customise how you view webpages, either by writing your own scripts, or choosing from a large library of custom-made ones. You need to install this before the rest of the items in this section.
  
  
• LJ Instant Comment -- you can comment without clicking into the blog page itself.
  
  
• Word Count -- this applet counts the words you've highlighted on a webpage. I used to have a Firefox add-on for this, but it doesn't work with version 3.6.
  
  
• Google Account Multi-Login -- as the name says.
  
  
• fav.icio.us3 -- adds site icons to bookmarks on delicious. Neat. You can see at a glance whether it's hosted at AO3, FF.net, LJ etc.

Other Stuff

• Readability -- when ?format=light just isn't enough, this button will kill terrible formatting dead. It's the only way to read some pages without eye-bleeding.
  
  
• Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances -- lots of neat applets for getting rid of nasty formatting.
  
  
• AbiWord -- a free word processor. I've only just installed this to give it a try, but it looks good so far. It's very like Word, for what that's worth.
  
  
• AltMove -- scroll to the second app. This is a way to resize dialogue boxes with fixed dimensions. Once it's installed, you just press the Ctrl key and then click somewhere inside the dodgy window and use the mouse to drag it to the size you want. AWESOME.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/345660.html.