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Firefox is taking the world by storm. Its preview release has already chalked up more than 5,000,000 downloads. And its even begun (albeit in a small way) to have an impact on the market share of Microsofts Internet Explorer browser. Firefox is clearly off to a great start and it certainly should be—its 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 wed take a look at some of the more interesting extensions.
As with all things, Firefox could be improved. Firefox, by default, is designed to be a lightweight browser. That means that it doesnt ship with tons of extras. If you want additional features, youll need to go out and get them yourself. Fortunately, its easy to upgrade Firefox by installing “extensions.”
An extension is simply an add-on that extends Firefoxs 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, weve listed our favorite extensions. We use most of these in our day to day browsing and we think that youll find them helpful (and in some cases fun) as well.