50 Rad Firefox Add-Ons
Posted 12/15/2009 at 2:48pm
| by Adam Berenstain
Daily Browsing
1-Click YouTube Video DownloadThe Internet made celebrities of the Dramatic Look prairie dog, a sneezing baby panda, and Rick Astley, but that doesn’t mean these lovable critters have to stay on the Web. With 1-Click YouTube Video Download (and, duh, one click) you can snag videos from YouTube.com as FLV, M4P, 3GP, or HD downloads to play offline. 1-Click, we’re never gonna give you up.

That’s gotta hurt. Let’s see it again, and again….
Adblock Plus
Someday beer will be free and Adobe will release a Mac version of Flash that doesn’t suck. Until then, there’s Adblock Plus to keep your browsing free of annoying Whack-a-Mole banners and other unwanted ads. Just install, subscribe to an ad filter unique to your country, and you’re good to go--no more ads on any site you visit. Or you can control-click on specific ads to keep them from loading, and allow certain sites to keep displaying important messages from its sponsors. MacLife.com, for instance….

Those white spaces were ads before Adblock Plus.
Auto Copy
If you regularly mine the Web for text and images to copy and paste into other documents, give Auto Copy a try. Once installed, merely selecting something copies it to the Clipboard. Auto Copy’s contextual menu commands also let you paste selections directly into Firefox’s address or search fields and reload previously copied items into memory. These and Auto Copy’s other time-saving tricks will give your mousing fingers a well-deserved rest.

To copy with Auto Copy, just highlight, paste, and you’re done.
Converter
You know those currency and measurement converters all over the Internet? Forget ‘em...if you’ve got Converter. Just plug in your preferred units of time, currency, temperature, and measurement into Converter’s settings and it translates most Web pages to whatever you think is normal with a single click. Now you can plan that trip to Europe with confidence (we’re totally free to come with in the spring).

Converter’s conversions appear right with the text.
DownThemAll!
You spend a lot of time surfing the Web, but how much is spent downloading application updates, movie trailers, and other vital stuff? If your answer is ‘too much,’ DownThemAll can help. Not only does it accelerate up to 10 simultaneous downloads, retry stalled downloads, and give you live statistics about each file as it zips to your Mac, it lets you grab all a page’s images and links at once with a few clicks. Oh, and that acceleration? Our demo download crept along at 40 kbs a second until DownThemAll gobbled up the same file at more than 150kbs. If you gotta download, you gotta get DownThemAll.

Down the hatch with DownThemAll.
Download Statusbar
Say goodbye to moving the pop-up Downloads window out of your way. Download Statusbar replaces it with, well, a status bar at the bottom of your Web pages that’s there when you need it and gone when you don’t. Despite its small size, the status bar boasts plenty of information about your files, and it even lets you pause and resume downloads between sessions.

Discreet downloads are yours with Download Statusbar.
ErrorZilla Plus
When a page’s server can’t be found, ErrorZilla Plus replaces the standard Firefox error page with a battery of tools to help you find what you’re after. Peek at a Google Cache version of the page and use Ping, Whois, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see what’s what. ErrorZilla is like a utility belt that magically appears when trouble strikes.

ErrorZilla Plus lets you do more than just click the Reload button.
FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension)
Sure, add-ons are rad, but applying your favorites to every computer in your life isn’t. Enter FEBE to back up and restore your add-ons, themes, bookmarks, passwords and more with a single click or on a schedule you define. You can backup your extras to a local disk or send them to the cloud with FEBE’s Box.net integration. Did we mention that FEBE plays wacky sound effects, too? Don’t worry, they’re optional.

Want all your add-ons on multiple machines? You want FEBE.
FlashBlock
Flash gives us Web games and YouTube, but it’s also responsible for processor-hogging pop-up ads and annoying site intro movies. Try FlashBlock--it replaces embedded Flash with a generic box you can click to see the Flash file do its thing. If you don’t, you and your Mac’s processor can go happily about your business. FlashBlock also lets you leave your favorite sites unaffected if they always deliver Flash files you want to see.

Ming the Merciless wishes he could block Flash like this.
Quick Drag
In a world of Multi-Touch pinches and swipes, we’re happy Quick Drag puts a new spin on the O.G. gesture control, the venerable drag and drop. Just select text and drag and drop it anywhere on a page to kick off a Web search, or drag and drop images to save them to your Downloads folder. Modifier keys let you mix things up, and you can even drag and drop partial URLs to open them in new tabs. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Quick Drag doubles your drag and drop prowess.
WeatherBug
If you organize your life around the weather, why not bring weather reports to you with WeatherBug? Just plug in your location and WeatherBug adds the temperature, weather alerts and up to three days of forecasts to your Firefox pages. Additional forecast details, radar information, and weatheriffic news items open in a pop-up with just a click. You may not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but for everything else, there’s WeatherBug.

Looks like Saturday is a good day to stay in.
Xmarks
This may sound like science fiction, but someday people will use multiple computers to get their work done. If that future is now, you need Xmarks. It syncs your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers and browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE, and Chrome), and lets you add tags to your bookmarks that help other Xmarks users find interesting Web pages. And hey, their tags help you, too! Maybe this brave new world won’t be so bad after all.

Xmarks the spot and syncs your bookmarks, too.
Yet Another Smooth Scrolling
You visit a lot of Web pages. That means a lot of scrolling, and if the iPhone has taught us anything, it’s that the right kind of scroll can make navigating lengthy pages a breeze. That’s why YASS is so nice--its settings apply only to your Firefox windows, giving you as much (or as little) smooth, accelerated scrolling as you like. You can set three custom scrolling presets and switch among them on the fly with an icon in the status bar.

We nicknamed our presets First Gear, Second Gear, and Krazy Nitro.
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