Firefox Extensions

If you are like me, you have a huge collection of bookmarks in Firefox. I have some that I bookmarked years ago. I really need to go through my 1500+ bookmarks, look at each one, and decide if I still need it. However, I know this is something I will probably never have time to do. With CheckPlaces, I can at least let Firefox check each bookmark to be sure the web site still exists.

.CHM files are the "compiled HTML" files used for most Windows Help files. If you use Windows, they are easy to read. If you use Linux, it is not so easy. While there are several programs that will read and display CHM files, none of the work all that well for me. So I was very happy to discover CHM Reader for Firefox today.

Ever since I moved to Linux, I've been looking for a RSS reader that I like as much as Great News. I have finally found one that comes very close in Brief. Brief is a Firefox extension that adds a very simple, Great news-like feed reader to Firefox. It even stores the feeds locally for as long as you like, and just like Great News "as long as you like" can differ with each feed. It does not have some of the whiz-bang features of Great News, but if has most of the ones I regularly used.

From the Brief web description on addons.mozilla.org:

While nothing can replace parental supervision, a filtering program can help prevent stumbling across content unsuitable for your child. You can pay money for a content filter and often have little control over what it filters -- some commercial filters protect from political and religious sites that upset their corporate leaders as well as from p*rn, for example.

FoxFilter is a free content filter extension for the Firefox browser that you control.

From the FoxFilter web site:

There are a number of web site you can go through to download videos from sites like YouTube to your one system, like KeepVid -- but you have to wonder if such sites are tracking what you do.

FireBug is a must-have Firefox extension for anyone interested in web site design. It allows you to explore web pages (your own to debug or others to learn from) an an intuitive and very useful way. FireBug's author describes the extension like this:

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse.

I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 over the weekend as a release candidate for the new version of my "must have" Tab Mix Plus extension had been released. The upgrade seemed to go smoothly. Several extensions had to be disabled as they were not marked as working in Firefox 2.0, but I expected that. Unfortunately my theme was not compatible and the upgrade did not notice this. When Firefox 2.0 came up for the first time, the user interface was quite broken.

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 is out. While it is not the major upgrade IE 7 was, it is still getting good reviews and is reportedly worth the download. I haven't downloaded it yet because one of my must have extensions, Tab Mix Plus, has not been updated for Firefox 2.0 yet (although the author is hard at work on it). One of the problems with major upgrades to Firefox is that they often break a number of your favorite extensions.

Like most browsers, Firefox displays a somewhat useless error page when it cannot connect to a web site for some reason. Usually, it has nothing to do with your system as suggested by the error page and hitting the reload button is unlikely to fix problems on the server end.

I discovered a very simple Firefox extension (myurlbar_a) today that made me wonder how I have ever managed without it. It allows you to type site/page names (as well as the usual URLs) into Firefox's address bar. If you type a name instead of a URL, this extension searches your bookmarks and your history for sites whose names match and displays them in the address bar's dropdown box.