I’m a huge fan of the Firefox web browser, at least in its current incarnation. (Whether that fandom follows the next major upgrade, which allegedly suffers from creeping featuritis, remains to be seen.) One of the most lovely features of Firefox is that it allows additional features to be easily added, through a mechanism called “extensions.” I have eighteen of them installed, many of which I wouldn’t want to surf without. Here’s a list and some commentary:

• Adblock (and the associated auto-updated filter set, Adblock Filterset.G) This pair of treasures nukes 99.9% of the annoying ads on web pages.
• BugMeNot – Accesses a shared database of usernames and passwords for stupid web sites that require you to log in to view their content.
• Forecast Fox – Weather reports that appear in your status bar and are updated constantly. I have a love/hate relationship with this one. The concept is great, but it’s tied to a server that has absolutely awful weather forecasts for my area. (How bad? I live near San Diego. All summer it was predicting “morning showers” for my home town. That simply doesn’t happen here. We haven’t had a hundredth of an inch of rain since April.)
• Mouse Gestures – If you’ve never used a program that has mouse gestures, you probably won’t understand how incredibly useful this feature is. Now I find myself trying to use them in programs that don’t support them.
• PrefBar – Adds a menu bar that allows you to quickly turn on and off various browser functions (Java and Javascript on and off, create new tab, change font size, etc.) I don’t use this as much as I once did, but it’s still worth the screen real estate it takes.
• MediaPlayerConnectivity – A simple but very useful idea: it allows you to download the content of any page that has embedded media.
• DownThemAll! – A mass downloader that lets you download all the links or images in a page. Users love it, webmasters hate it. If you happen to run across an open directory that has a bunch of stuff you want, no more right click, save as, save, ok. DownThemAll! and it plays a little tunes when it’s finished leeching all the content.
• QuickNote – Yellow sticky notes that live in your browser. Great for quick notes, keeping track of magic numbers and URLs, whatever you want.
• Mozilla Calendar – Another love/hate relationship. If they ever finish it, it’ll be a killer app. In the meantime, it’s a semi-useful quirk.
• Web Developer – I’m not sure why I have this installed at all. I never use it anymore.
• VideoDownloader – It does exactly one thing: it lets you easily download videos from YouTube. If you ever want to do that, you need this. If you don’t, you don’t.
• FeedView – Makes your RSS feeds look better. It’s kind of quicrky, and I suspect there are better extensions available that do the same thing. But this one does what I need, so why look for something better?
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – What can I say about StumbleUpon? I love it, I just love it. Click the little icon, and a new web site appears. You can select what categories you want and every click delivers a new one.
• Performancing – A blog editor. Again, kind of quirky, but it does what I need. I do wish they’d publish the source code so I could bend it to my will. But for all my griping, I’m using it to post this.
• NoScript – Turns off Javascript for all sites not in your whitelist.
• View Source Chart – Organizes the “View Source” function to make it readable. Ever want to figure out how a web site does something, but the source code is a big mess? This extension fixes that.