With the upcoming release of Mozilla Firefox 3 everyone is abuzz about new features and enhanced performance – but I won’t be ditching Firefox 2 until my favorite Add-ons are upgraded as well. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
ColorZilla
Great for web and graphic developers, this tool lets you find the alphanumeric code for any color on a website.
Cooliris Previews
Mouse over an image and a small icon appears. When clicked, you see the full sized image in a pop-up window. It’s a handy little time saver.
Copernic Desktop Search 2 Toolbar
One of only two toolbars I use – it serves as a quick and easy way to search my computer from my browser window.
del.icio.us Bookmarks
This allows me to easily create and tag bookmarks directly to my del.icio.us account, so I have them wherever I go. Using tags means I can find that one in six hundred link I’m looking for much more efficiently.
Download Statusbar
It’s just better to be able to watch the progress of your downloads in your active window, and the extra features it provides make managing them easier, too.
Dust-Me Selectors
A neat little tool that tells you what CSS is and is not in use on a page. Excellent for when you have been working on a complicated site for a while and forgot what you have removed.
gDocsBar
Allows you to see all of your Google Docs in a sidebar, but I rarely use it. It just doesn’t save much time because I have to switch between my del.icio.us bookmarks sidebar to use it.
Gmail Notifier
Lets me know when I have new Gmail without getting in the way – a must have!
PDF Download
Prompts me to download PDFs instead of opening them in the browser – handy, but doesn’t always work.
PicLens
A much more appealing way to view photos on MySpace, Facebook, and Google Images, among others.
Sothink Web Video Downloader
A wonderful little application that allows you to save pretty much any streaming video to your hard drive. Why wait for buffering when you can just download it?
Web Developer
This is a truly powerful toolbar, and the 2nd of only two that I use. It incorporates dozens of other tools to give web developers quick and easy access to things that make our lives easier. It’s “Edit CSS” tool allows you to tinker with the CSS code from any site you’re viewing, which makes CSS troubleshooting ten times easier. I can’t live without this one.
You can download any of these from Mozilla’s Firefox Add-ons site. Sadly, most of them aren’t compatible with development versions of Firefox 3 yet, but I hope they will be when it’s released!