My Must-Have Firefox Add-Ons

Despite those horrid memory leaks that leave my poor 512MB RAM computer crawling and dying and begging for some Opera therapy, I still like Mozilla Firefox. It's the top dog as far as Internet Explorer (IE) alternatives.

Granted, I do use Opera as well, but I prefer Firefox. It's more compatible with sites. With Opera, I have to contend with compatibility issues with sites that automatically check if you're running IE or Firefox. Then there also appears to be some Javascript issues. Maybe all of these have remedies, but I'm not techy or
patient enough to use it. (And yes, I'm aware of the "Show as IE/Firefox" feature, yet for some reason, I've only had limited success.)

And IE is just out of the question. Being a constant target for a omnibus of viruses and exploits, as well as having to annoyingly ask me constantly about running an Active X since removing that nag would be dangerous, I really don't like IE. The only reasons I even keep it are:
1. Because some more archaic sites may have compatibility issues
2. I can use the "IE View" extension (which comes in handy if I want to be signed in more than one accounts at a time *cough* like Yahoo!Answers to vote for myself */cough*)
3. It's easier for visitors to use IE and I don't have to sign out of anything.

But anyways, back to the original subject of this post as well as one of the major reasons I still use Firefox, "My Must-Have Firefox Add-Ons" (in no particular order).

"Book Burro is an extension for the FireFox and Flock web browsers that tries to save you time and money when you find a book you want.

When Book Burro senses you are viewing a book, it will add a small panel to the upper right corner.

Clicking the panel will trigger the agent to go query for prices at other book sites and check your local libraries for availability." ~quoted from the site

del.icio.us I like the idea of social bookmarking, and I'm also curious about which sites people think are worthy to bookmark, however, I don't like the idea of clogging up my Bookmarks Toolbar with the bookmarklets. That's where this extension come in. That way, I can put two little buttons up there by the address bar.

FoxLingo
Translate pages with ease! What's not to love? I'm sure there are other lovely features, but I just mainly use the translation options in the context menu (aka the "right-click" menu).

Foxmarks
My del.iciou.us is for my more whimsical bookmarking, however, for those grounded and necessary bookmarks I still use the menu on Firefox. But then what happens if I need the link at a different computer? Then I can use Foxmarks!

"The Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. It also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via my.foxmarks.com. An easy-to-use wizard guides you through the quick startup process. Then Foxmarks works silently in the background to keep your bookmarks up-to-date on all your computers.

Simple. Solid. Free. And ready to use." ~quoted from Foxmarks homepage

FoxyTunes
"Do you listen to Music while surfing the Web? FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser." ~quoted from FoxyTunes home page

Google Toolbar
Obviously useful if you use Google to pretty much LIVE like I'm starting to do.

"Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

Hundreds of scripts are already available for free. And if you're the tinkerer sort, you can also write your own." ~quoted from Greasespot homepage

I love this thing. There are tons of little useful scripts for Yahoo, Google, eBay, and much more. Search and ye shall probably find.

"With gTranslate you can translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. The extension uses the Google translation services to translate the text." ~quoted from gTranslate page

This is good. Sometimes I don't want to translate the WHOLE page.

IE View Lite
Remember earlier when I was talking about needing to open stuff in Internet Explorer every once in a while? Here is my quick means of doing so.

KarClient
You need this in order to record on the karaoke site kSolo.com If you think you can bust a note, or you at least have a fun time trying to, then this is for you!

Link Alert
It's nice to be able to know what you're clicking. This alerts you to whether the link is a pop-up in a new window, PDF, Javascript, .EXE file (aka application), Zip file, Excel spreadsheet, or Word document.

Orbit Downloader
Not quite an add-on, but it does have Firefox support. I use this to download files from video streaming sites like YouTube, CrunchyRoll, and etc. It also functions as a great all-around download manager. I'm pretty sure that it can download almost anything off of a site.

Paste and Go
I missed this from Opera. The ability to paste a link into the address bar AND go to it in one click. There's also the ability to paste something into the search box and search, but I don't use that one quite as much.

RetailMeNot
What's better than the ease of shopping online? Getting a deal while you're at it! That's what makes a site like RetailMeNot.com so awesome. It compiles all of those coupon and promo codes in one place. And now with this extension, it can automatically tell you when there are available coupons for a site.
Pretty cool, but it can get annoying, especially when you can't find a code that fits your needs. Like Amazon.com. Trying to find a useful code for them is a mess.

rikaichan is a popup Japanese-English/German/French/Russian dictionary extension for Firefox.

Features:

* Simple to use, just hover the mouse on top of a Japanese word.
* Automatically de-inflects verbs and adjectives.
* Has an optional toolbar that allows you to manually type the word to lookup.
* Detailed kanji view shows meaning/keyword in English, on/kun readings, and other information.
* Hiragana, katakana and half-width katakana are treated the same making it possible to lookup stylized/emphasized words." ~quoted from polarcloud.com homepage

Session Manager
"Building upon SessionStore, this extension allows you to save the current state of Firefox (history, text data, cookies) and return to that state at any later moment. Besides the manually saved states, Session Manager automatically stores the current state in case of a crash." ~quoted from session manager page

"ShortShip allows you to find the *lowest* price on eBay, by adding new functionality to the eBay search! The problem with eBay? A $10 item with $2 shipping is more expensive than a $9 dollar item with $10 shipping according to eBay's 'sort by lowest price' since it doesn't take shipping into account at all!

Shipping costs are different depending on the seller. It could just be that one seller is located closer to you than another, and thus, shipping is cheaper if you go with the local guy. Every seller calculates shipping differently, sometimes to make his item appear cheaper on eBay's sorting. Check out the problem here. This is a major issue on eBay, and little has been done to correct it, until now!" ~Short Ship homepage

Smart Middle Click
One of the best things about tabbed browsing is being able to open a link in a new tab by middle clicking on it. However, if the link was javascript, you were out of luck. Not anymore!

"Speed Dial allows fast access to your most visited websites. It loads in a tab, and will show thumbnail views of it's assigned websites. Those thumbnails will be refreshed automatically in the background." ~quoted from the Speed Dial main page

It's not as smooth as Opera's version but it functions.

And there's my list of must-have Firefox Add-Ons. Enjoy.