Solo Technology

One of the nice things about Firefox is the extensibility — it is very easy to add extensions to gain additional functionality or features. Some of them are incredibly useful. I don’t use a lot of them, but figured I’d write ‘em down in case anyone is interested.

Tabbrowser Preferences: This tends to be the first one I add to a fresh install of Firefox. It is a rather simple extension, but gives much more control of tabs and windows and their behaviors. For instance, by clicking a box, I can ensure that when I use the built-in searchbar the results will go to a new tab (in the foreground). Or when I click on a link in an email the site is opened in a new tab instead of opening a new firefox window. Slick.

Forecastfox: I’m a weather junkie. This one adds my local forecast info to the bottom of the browser window. Very configurable and I’ve grown to expect it down there.

View Formatted Source: As a guy who gets to do web development from time to time, I have to say this has been probably the most useful extension I’ve ever played with. It just rocks when I need to unravel a complex site. From their description:

Displays formatted and color-coded source and optional CSS information for each element. You can see exactly which CSS rules match for an element. The rules are displayed including file name and line number. The topmost element is that with the highest priority. You can fold/unfold/hilite block elements (table, tr, td, div, span,…). Really cool feature: select a block level element of interest directly in the page and view it’s source! To help you to quickly analyze the source code you can view images directly from the source and add comments to folded block elements. The code view is based on the rendered document, so you will also see dynamically (by Javascript) created and modified html elements! Works also with frames and selected text.

Simply incredible. Oh - this one needs some “hacking” to get it working with any recent versions of firefox. See the comments on the page I linked. Easy to do and well worth the effort.

There ya go. Those are the ones I truly use. I have a rotating cast of dozens that come and go, but these are the ones that are always with me. For instance, I’ve just started using “undoclosetab“. Yep, just as the name might suggest… How many times have you just closed a browser window and, in a very Homer like fashion, said “Doh!”? This one helps.

Just updated to 1.5 and have busted extensions? Either check the page for “View Formatted Source” for one workaround, or check this link for another alternative.

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