4 Firefox Addons to Ease your Life

4 Firefox Addons to Ease your Life

   I’ve experienced 100s of Firefox add-ons, and have whittled them down to about two dozen I use on a regular basis — even out of these, I have favorites. Here are 4 I find both casually enjoyable and sheerly indispensable; I hope they add value to your browsing. Even if you’ve heard of them before, I share specific reasons why they’re so useful + fun (usefun!). All are compatible with the wonderful Firefox 3.
1. DownloadHelper

Ever wanted to download Flash videos from YouTube or another site and found yourself frustrated by sluggish web conversion utilities?


This add-on keeps rocketing in popularity, and with good reason: it simplifies the process of downloading multimedia with a couple clicks. It can be as easy as opening a movie-playing page, clicking the toolbar icon, and selecting the file todownload. Moments later, it’ll be on your hard drive.

The interface is a bit odd at first, but once you get up to speed, it’s a breeze. I use this for archiving FLV copies of videos I’ve created — please don’t do bad things with it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006/

2. Picnik

Picnik has saved me a tremendous amount of time by removing wasteful steps in my workflow. This add-on provides an easy path to visually send a webpage into my fave online Picnik image editor (many features are free) so it can be cropped and edited with delicious effects, then posted on your blog, Flickr, another photo-sharing site, or even saved back to your hard drive. For that reason alone, it has a halo appeal for bloggers who need webpage screenshots… fast!

Before, I suffered with saving screen captures to disk, then Photoshopping them because most lesser editors are too limited on the tasty eye candy. But Picnik has a fine balance of both, and enables theprocess to take place totally online.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4889/

3. ScrapBook

Perhaps you desire to capture a webpage’s appearance, not as a static image but as an annotable file? ScrapBook will do that and more for you: it can cache whole webpages or parts of them forlater review, then you can add notes and sort your clippings into folders.

This is terribly handy if you’re on a laptop and want to save some offline reading material for when you get on a plane or train.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427/

4. Tree Style Tab

Arguably, I may’ve saved the best and most un-obvious for last. Tabs are a fundamental and common feature in every popular web browser, but they’re often positioned horizontally. If you’re a frequent tabber, instead of messing around with proportionally-shrinking or even multi-row horizontal tabs, wouldn’t you like to be able to have a long list of vertical tabs? Even better, you can expand/collapse these into trees, change the width of their titles on-the-fly (or lock the width), and tweak the nitty-gritty details. Also, on the rare occasion should you want to revert to horizontal tabs, Tree Style Tab gives you that power too.

Once I transitioned to vertical tabs, I never looked back: vertical tabs are far easier to manage and sort, exponentially boosting my effectiveness and allowing me to make far more use of Firefox’s “Open All in Tabs”, since the tree-view helps keep clutter down.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/