Niponwave

One of the many reasons why Firefox rocks has to be extensions! Thanks to extensions, there is no limit to how you can customise your favourite browser to simplify your online life. While extensions are many - each suited to a specific purpose - choosing the right ones for your own need might not be easy. More often than not, users are tempted to use a lot of extensions and ultimately end up in having a sluggish Firefox. What I would suggest is, one should use only a handful of extensions, only those that he/she actually needs. I use these few extensions.

Delicious Bookmarks

This nifty extension saves a lot of your time while saving bookmarks to the popular social bookmarking site Del.icio.us which I have written about in the previous post. With this extension installed you don’t have to visit the site every time you want to bookmark a link, all you have to do is press the standard Ctrl+D key combination or click on save a new bookmark under the delicious menu.

Since I want apps to be least obtrusive and just do the job they are supposed to, I have customised a few interface settings which I am glad to share here.

• Go to Tool>Delicious Options. Under tab General uncheck all the status bar buttons. This makes sure your status bar stays neat.
• Then go to Advanced tab. Check Hide the standard standard Firefox bookmarks menu.
• Delicious will add 2 buttons to your navigation toolbar. Remove them - right click on the navigtion toolbar and click customize. Drag the icons and just drop them onto the window that opens named Customize Toolbar.
• A delicious toolbar is also added by default. Right-click and uncheck it to hide it.

Gmail Notifier

This very handy extension sits right inside the Firefox window and gives me an instant notification whenever there is a new mail in my Gmail - it smartly pops up at the lower right corner of the screen.

To make the most of this extension, customize the preferences as shown in the pic below. You can choose to have an icon in the statusbar if you want though, which I have done away with. You can also have a music file of your choice to be played during each notification - the file should be in .wav format.

As you can see from the screenshots, I have added a button in the extreme right of the navigation toolbar. You too can add that icon simply dragging it from the customize toolbar window.

It also supports multiple gmail accounts and even hosted gmail accounts.

If you are one of those unlucky netizens who are bugged by hundreds of unsolicited email and have lost control of your mailbox altogether - a condition termed email bankruptcy, then you are probably not going to like this extension as your pain will only increase with it. But don’t fret, you can take back control on your mailbox by efficiently managing your mails which is going to be the topic of my next article.

Other than the above 2, I use a few web design related extensions like FireFTP, Firebug, Colorzilla, MeasureIt and Web Developer.