Firefox Extensions

Although Safari, the standard MacOSX browser, is one of the best browsers out there, I still stick to Firefox for most of my browsing needs. The reason is simple: extensions. Firefox is simply the most extendable browser of all, and the number of extensions is staggering. Between test-drives and must-haves, I regularly have 10 to 20 extensions loaded. These are my current Firefox extensions:

1. AdBlock with AdBlock Filterset.G Updater - must-have (instructions here)
2. NoScript - must-have
3. Down Them All
4. Linkification - simple and useful
5. ShowIP - simple and useful
6. All-in-one Mouse Gestures - requires some learning, but very addictive when you get the hang of it
7. ChromEdit
8. Flashblock
9. JustBlogIt
10. FlashGot
11. Tabbrowser Preferences
12. PDF Download - simple and useful
13. StumbleUpon - lots of fun, huge timewaster
14. Web Developer - must-have
15. and last but not least, the Google Toolbar for Firefox

Unlike  most people, I never moved to Internet Explorer. When I started working for Sun, in 1998, only a few sales and marketing types had Wintel laptops. Everybody else got a Sun workstation running Solaris and had to use Netscape for mail and web. I didn't exactly feel I was missing out on anything until a couple of years later, when Netscape 4.7x started to look and feel hopelessly outdated. I moved to later Netscape versions, but when it became apparent that Mozilla was usually ahead of the "official" releases in most respects, I skipped over to Mozilla as soon as it became reasonably stable under Solaris (around 0.8x, IIRC) and never looked back.

In 2001 I bought my first Mac, and kept on using Mozilla, although it was a bit sluggish on MacOSX. I was happily married to the Mozilla suite until I started hearing rumors about some annoying upstart that was diverting people away from the "true path". I ended up trying Firefox, and once I found it came configured by default with all the options I used to have to choose manually in Mozilla, I left the Mozilla suite for good. When Safari was released by Apple, I temporarily switched to it, and although it is an excellent browser, I was by then too addicted to bookmarking groups of tabs and using extensions. I now use Firefox for most of my reading with ads and Javascript disabled, and use Safari for searches and sites that need flash or java.

Lately I've been trying out Camino - a more Apple-ified version of Firefox - and there's much to like, such as the easily acessible "Reset Camino" menu option and the fact that it comes with built-in ad blocking. Good as it is, however, I think it stands a pretty slim chance of enticing mass desertions from the Firefox main branch, especially once Firefox 1.5 comes out of beta.