Review: Ten Extensions Enhance Firefox

[RuffRyders]

Review: Ten Extensions Enhance Firefox

Firefox is taking the world by storm. Its preview release has already chalked up more than 5,000,000 downloads. And it's even begun (albeit in a small way) to have an impact on the market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Firefox is clearly off to a great start and it certainly should be—it's a great browser.

Today is the day that the official, 1.0 release of Firefox is shipping. We looked at the Firefox technology preview back in September, and found a lot to like. Now that the official 1.0 release is out, we thought we'd take a look at some of the more interesting extensions. For some insight into what the forces behind Mozilla are thinking, check out this interview with Mozilla president Mitchell Baker.

As with all things, Firefox could be improved. Firefox, by default, is designed to be a lightweight browser. That means that it doesn't ship with tons of extras. If you want additional features, you'll need to go out and get them yourself. Fortunately, it's easy to upgrade Firefox by installing "extensions."

An extension is simply an add-on that extends Firefox's functionality. You can get lots of different extensions on the Firefox extensions site. Since there are nearly two hundred different extensions currently available, it can take some time to sift through them all on the Firefox site. Extensions are broken down into the following categories for convenient browsing:

* Appearance
* Blogging
* Bookmarks
* Chat
* Configuration
* Contacts
* Developer Tools
* Download Tools
* Games
* Humor
* Kiosk Browsing
* Miscellaneous
* Mouse Gestures
* Navigation
* News
* Page Display
* Privacy
* Search Tools
* Security
* Tabbed Browsing

Fortunately for you, we've listed our favorite extensions. We use most of these in our day to day browsing and we think that you'll find them helpful (and in some cases fun) as well.

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