I use Firefox quite a bit. The main reason for this, rather than using a browser faster and more integrated with my desktop (such as Konqueror, which I also use quite a bit and like) is its many extensions. I thought it might be helpful to others to list here some of the Firefox extensions that I use, that you, my readers, might also try and find to be useful.
I started writing this blog post quite some time ago (on 2008-12-13 in fact) but then got distracted by other things, so I have decided to split it up into several parts and post what I have written now. I will post more parts later about more Firefox extensions which I find useful.
Anyway, here goes, in roughly the order I started using them.
First up is Firebug. Firebug was for some time pretty much the only reason that I used Firefox, and it is an indispensable tool for anyone doing web development or design, or just curious about how websites are put together. It lets you browse and edit the HTML document tree in real time, see the how CSS is applied to it, map HTML elements to the view rendered by the browser and back, edit the CSS and see the affects as you go, debug Javascript, and more. If you are doing any sort of web development and have not used Firebug, you should install it now.
Operator is a handy extension for doing things with microformats on webpages you visit. For example, if you see an event mentioned on a website (and marked up with hCalendar), Operator will give you an option to add it to your calendar. Similarly you can save people’s contact details to your address book, look up addresses you see on web pages on online mapping sites (like Google Maps), and so on. It can be extended by small ‘user scripts’ written in Javascript to support more microformats, and more services to use them with.
Thoughts of a geek 