Five Firefox Extensions You Need

Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source web browsing program available at http://www.mozilla.com. The distinct advantages of Firefox over Internet Explorer are:

1. It is not a Microsoft application.

2. It contains a number of superior native features.

3. It has a large number of available customizing extensions.

This third advantage is what we're talking about today. The Mozilla web site contains over 2500 extensions for the Firefox browser, and more are being added every day. How's a person supposed to sift through all that to find the ones that are useful? Never fear, that's what I'm here for! I don't claim to have looked at every extension, but I have spent a considerable amount of time sorting through extensions looking for things that are highly useful, and I re-visit the site often to check for new extensions. Here are the extensions that I use nearly every day to make my life easier:

1. Linkification - Have you ever come across a page that has the address of another page in the text of the page somewhere, but the author did not make it a clickable link? I have this problem all the time on my favorite web community/blogging site. This extension is the answer. It takes any web page address that starts with an http:// and makes it into a clickable link. It also works for email addresses. No more copying and pasting to visit those pages. This truly is an extension that I use every day.

2. Adblock Plus & Filterset.G Updater - Do you have a web site that used to be a favorite, but now you've quit visiting it because the adds on the page are so irritating? Here's your solution. This combination of extensions can help you manage the visibility of adds on web sites. Adblock Plus gives you the power to block elements of pages if you don't want to see them. The Filterset.G Updater is a pre-populated list of ads to block, updated periodically. With this combination, you'll rarely even have to define which ads to block!

3 FlashBlock - This extension is similar to Adblock Plus, except that it blocks Flash elements. This applies to Flash ad elements (Yahoo! is famous for these), but it will also block video clip ad files, like those on YouTube. The great thing is that it doesn't hide the elements, it just keeps them from playing. It will place a "play" button on the element, so you can choose which ones to view. This works great for those MySpace pages that have 2 songs and 3 video clips that all start up when you get to the page.

4. Gmail Manager - This extension monitors your Gmail account and displays, in the status bar, the number of messages in your inbox. The real benefit of this extension is if you have multiple accounts, as it allows you to track several accounts at once. It also allows you to access your inbox by clicking the item in the status bar, making it easy to switch between multiple accounts seamlessly.

5. Smart Middle Click - I use the middle click option to open links in new tabs all the time. I used to get frustrated when the link was a javascript link rather than a regular link because the middle click wouldn't work. That problem is solved with this extension. Now, those javascript links will behave the same as HTML links when you middle click them.

There are other extensions that I have installed and that I use from time to time, but these five are are my favorites and ones that I use nearly every day. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.