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A Gift For You

Mozilla released version 1.5 of the ever-free Firefox web browser two days ago. You probably know how excited about this.

My favorite things about this new release are:

  • Faster page loading (the speeds are, like, two froghairs faster!)
  • Improved rendering engine
  • Improved Options menu
  • Improved tab control
  • Support for SVG and the new canvas tag

As for extensions, there are many new ones that do ultra-kewl things previously unavailable in Firefox. Here is what my standard extensions are (for now):

  • Nuke Anything Enhanced – Allows you to right-click anything on a web page and hide it. Great for hiding annoying graphics.
  • MeasureIt – Draw a box on the screen and get height/width measurements. Great for aligning page elements when designing.
  • Web Developer Toolbar – The third most-used tool in my arsenal, only behind Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
  • Bookmark Synchronizer – For keeping my 1200+ bookmarks the same between the office, home, and my laptop. Requires an FTP server to act as a go-between.
  • Adblock – One of the best extensions ever. This reduces popups and ads on web sites you visit. Includes ability to block pesky Flash overlay ads. Did it miss something? Right-click it and choose “AdBlock This” and poof!
  • Adblock Filterset.g Updater – A companion to Adblock, this keeps your list of blockable ads updated behind the scenes. I can’t remember the last time I got a popup ad.
  • PDF Download – Lets you choose whether to open or download a PDF when clicked, rather than opening it automatically, which is Firefox’s default behavior.
  • Viamatic foXpose – This must be seen to be believed, and is only available in Firefox 1.5. The extension sets up a button that instantly displays screen shots of all of your open tabs on one page, allowing you to click the one you want to jump to.
  • Tab Preview – This one displays a little thumbnail of the tab contents when you hover your mouse over an inactive tab. Quite cool.

Know of any other good ones I missed?

Published inBrowsersInternet

6 Comments

  1. june june

    thanks will! I don’t know if this exists or not, but I would really like a “view source” highlight feature. It would function something like this:
    You highlight the portion of the webpage you are intersted in and when you click “view source” the code equivalent of what you selected will also be highlighted.

    Anyone seen an extension that does this?

  2. june: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=697
    but it doesn’t work in 1.5 yet, soon will though. It works great and you also can see the css associated to the element over which you are hovering when you have chosen “view selected source”.

    I haven’t tried number one on you list there will, but I’d recommend Aardvark – http://www.karmatics.com/aardvark/

    Here you can hover a box, press R to remove it, or V to view source of that box. Great for debugging, and started via the right-click menu.

    MeasureIt isn’t new to 1.5 though… Nor is the Web Dev toolbar.

    Adblock is the old version. Try the new adblock with less bugs. “Adblock plus”
    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=266291

    I’ll definately check out the bookmark Synchronizer.

  3. Lauren Wise Lauren Wise

    Stumble. How could you forget stumble?!?!? It is the best waste of time EVER. I love stumble. It rhymes with bumble!

  4. Hi Henrik – thanks for the input. I have tried Aardvark in the past and should probably give it a spin again. What does Adblock Plus have that Adblock doesn’t?

    Lo – Are you referring to Stumble Upon?

  5. Lauren Wise Lauren Wise

    Yeah, Stumble Upon. I heart it. Have you noticed that Firefox loads a little slower now? I’m using a Mac, not windows.

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