AuctioneerTech Firefox add-on collection

Wednesday’s post showed how a simple extension called Weave can synchronize your Firefox passwords, bookmarks and other preferences between computers. That’s all fine and good, but what happens when you are installing a fresh copy of Firefox and want to install all your favorite add-ons and plugins? Do you write down your list of favorite Firefox plugins from your old computer and install each manually on the new machine?

Last June, Mozilla launched Add-on Collections. A collection is simply a grouping of Firefox extensions that can be batch-installed. You can create your own collection or you can subscribe to a collection created by someone else. This feature makes it really easy to share your collection or quickly update your Firefox to match all the extensions advocated by someone else.

Today, in the final part of our three-part series Fixing Firefox, we’re announcing the AuctioneerTech Firefox add-on collection. We’ve put together 15 add-ons that we use regularly to make Firefox more secure and more feature rich.

User interface enhancements

• Classic Compact
  Used to reclaim Firefox screen real estate. It’s probably our favorite plugin.
• Locationbar2
  One of the best security features of Internet Explorer 8 is the way it greys-out everything in the URL except for the top level domain. Now you can bring this functionality to Firefox to make it easy to know exactly where you are.
• Tiny Menu
  A plugin also mentioned in our article about making Firefox tiny, Tiny Menu replaces the main menu with a single, nested drop-down to conserve space.
• Speed Dial
  Opera has for a long time had an amazing feature called Speed Dial which displays a grid of thumbnails for your favorite websites. This feature was copied by Chrome and Safari and now you can bring it to Firefox.

Privacy and security enhancements

• NoScript
  The king of privacy and security plugins, NoScript got its own article on AuctioneerTech nearly a year ago.
• Adblock Plus
  If you get annoyed by banner ads, this plugin is for you. It blocks content from popular ad networks and is so effective that it makes some web pages look naked.
• Flash Block
  While we can’t imagine anyone hating Adobe Flash with as much evangelical, foaming-at-the-mouth fervor as we do, we hope we’re not alone. Now you can have all Flash elements blocked and replaced by a simple graphic that, when you click it, enables the Flash element. Now you don’t have to worry about unexpected audio or video playing or, worse, Flash cookies that don’t get deleted when you clear your browsing history in your browser.
• Permit Cookies
  A very simple application that overrides the cookie storage mechanism in Firefox. To use, tell Firefox to delete cookies when you close it. Use this plugin to selectively permit cookies that won’t be deleted.

Make Firefox work better with specific sites

• Better Gmail
  Gmail is great, but Better Gmail makes using it on the web better.
• Better Greader
  Google Reader is an amazing program, but using Better Greader is the only way we’ve found to completely eliminate the buttons and navigation to make the content truly full screen. Select options from the add-on menu. You want the minimalistic skin, which lets you toggle the Google navigation header using the W key on your keyboard.

Miscellaneous

• Weave Sync
  Where have we heard about Weave before?
• Screengrab
  Taking pictures of web pages just got easier. Save the whole page or a selection that you make by drawing a box with your mouse.

Web development

• Firebug
  Firebug is the most-used and most-loved web development plugin. It allows you to interact with the code behind the web page you’re viewing. If you’re curious about how a website works, Firebug will let you hover your mouse over each element and it will automatically highlight the code that generates the element. If you do any web development whatsoever, Firebug makes you use Firefox instead of alternative browsers for your testing.
• Firecookie
  Firecookie requires Firebug and lets you see exactly what cookies your browser has accepted. It also lets you modify the cookies in real-time so you can test the security of your site and that of other sites.
• Yslow
  Another plugin that requires Firebug, Yslow is actually a Yahoo! product that analyzes the way that your page loads and offers suggestions to reduce load time to make your site faster and less server-intensive.

We hope you find the collection useful. If you like it, be sure to give it a positive review. Get the collection and rate it from here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/auctioneertech

Are we missing something? Do you know of a plugin that does a better job than one of those included in the collection? Let us know in the comments.