Firefox Extensions

With the release of Firefox 2.0 comes a renewed question for Firefox users. What are your absolute favorite Firefox extensions? Is there one in particular that you simply can’t live without?

For me, I would have to put the HTML Validator at the top of my list. This is a fantastic extension that automatically notifies you if the page you’re viewing is not valid. A small icon in the bottom right corner of your browser informs you whether the page is completely valid, there are warnings on the page, or there are actually errors in the code. Then, if you view the source of the page, HTML Validator lists the warnings and errors on the page, and will bring you straight to the problematic code when you click on the warning or error. To sweeten the pot even further, although this is not a feature I have used extensively, yet, HTML Validator even includes a tool called Tidy, which will attempt to clean up the source for you.


Coming in a close second for me would be the bbCodeXtra extension, which adds a context menu to your right-click menu, allowing you to automatically add BBCode and/or XHTML code to the text you are entering. If you copy a link to the clipboard, you can highlight your text, right-click, and choose to create a hyperlink with the address that’s on your clipboard. If you copy a section of someone’s post, you can right-click, and choose to paste that text as a “quote” into a forum post.

Also near the top of my list is the Web Developer Toolbar. This extension adds an entirely new tool bar to your Firefox browser. Some of the tools (which are too numerous to outline completely) included in the toolbar are the option to disable images (or even specific images) in the page, the option to disable various parts of the CSS in the page, the option to edit the page’s CSS, the option to resize the browser window to a specific resolution, and much, much more.

So, now that I’ve told you a bit about my favorite extensions, why don’t you share a little information about your favorites? What am I missing when it comes to Firefox?