Guide to making firefox Awesome

The things I am going to teach you in the following thread will make your online surfing experience...wait for it....awesome.

First things first, explorer sucks, firefox rocks. Next, Add-ons in firefox are neat little scripts that serve as extensions to fully equip firefox for whatever you need. They should be used and abused, but more importantly tailored to your desires. I have done extensive searches for the best add-ons that make my surfing life very easy. I am going to list some that you should get. Forgive me if this is already known to you.

*EDIT: This is now outdated. I will resort to an easier way of sharing my choice of addons with you with mozilla's new "Collections" feature. You may find my updates list at this site.

Also look at the one of my posts below as to how to get Autopager to work in this forum*

Most important: Security

NoScript  - Blocks all scripts from websites until you choose to allow it. Websites these days are very multi-faceted. They have flash stuff, ActiveX scripts, and many other scripts that run as soon as you visit a page. They may even send things to your computer such as trojan files, unbeknownst to you. This neat add-on blocks all of it by default. Then since you may want to restore more functionality to the site than the plain html text, or the site may look weird if it is flash based, all you have to do is allow the website. You may notice that some sites link to other websites, such as advertisement sites, or other annoying ones like googlesyndication or clicktracking, etc. You can keep them blocked, avoiding their harassments while continuing to enjoy the awesomeness of the original website.

Adblock Plus - Removes all advertisements you may come across through a filter, which you subscribe to based on your country of location I believe (free of course). Not 100% blocking but hell of a lot better than without it. Whatever doesnt get caught you can manually disable, and if that fails, you can block it with NoScript, and if even that fails, then live with it lol. With this add-on you can browse websites without making an effort to ignore ads, because they wont be there.

Customize Google - Used to work much better until google updated the firmware and this add on hasnt caught up entirely. Blocks ads and click tracking of all google related sites. Also forces secure connections to important stuff like gmail, etc (some are now defaulted to this by google). I would just set it and forget it. Make sure to go to options when you install this and check all the boxes that you need.

Optimization

AutoPager - This one is really a life saver. You know how in google searches or torrent searches you have pages and pages you have to click through sometimes. 1, then, 2, then 3, or Next, Next, Next. Well this solves this for good. next pages are automatically loaded at the bottom of the current page, creating one long page that never ends. All you have to do is scroll down and you will see a green box pop up bottom right "loading.." and the next page or two are already there. Sadly, this does not work with most forums (perhaps a future feature?). But all in all this saves so much time and allows you to really focus on your searches.

Undo Closed Tabs Button - How many times have you accidentally closed a tab you needed? Crickey! Hate it when that happens. But fear no more, for this add-on adds an extra button to your browser (like back , home, reload button) that Undoes it like microsoft word. I believe it can store something like 10 tabs that you closed and undo them all. Saves so much time and stress!

Download Statusbar - Hate that annoying pop up window of your downloads that doesnt go away when you finish downloading? Fixed! Now the downloads go to the bottom left of your statusbar and stay or leave after finished depending on your settings. Now you can download without an extra window.

URL Fixer - Hmm lets type aionelysium.cmo and press enter, whoops, wrong page. Notice the error (.cmo instead of .com). Easy mistake to make, very often if you type hurriedly. Not anymore, this fixes the error with a popup saying "did you mean x.com?" yes or no. Lovely!

BabelFish - Used altavista to translate something before? Now do it on the spot, with a tiny popup whenever you select a word or phrase. Saves so much time and can choose what translation engine to use.

IE Tab - Explorer sucks, yes? But sometimes firefox doesnt load the pages correctly, or noscript is being impossible. Rather than starting up a whole new browser, right click the link and open in an IE tab using explorer engine. Fixes most problems with sites not already migrated to firefox support (used to be worse than now). Convenient.

SkipScreen - Use rapidshare or megupload? This add-on apparently skips all the pages of waiting and goes directly to downloading. I havent tried it yet but it sounds nice and useful. Hope it works!

Beautify Firefox

ColorfulTabs - Cant tell one tab from another? Want tabs to fade out when not using them? This little add-on gives a color to every tab in a neat little scheme. Its only a visual change but it works.

Cooliris - Want to view the pictures on a site in theater mode? Want a three dimensional field to view the pictures? This neat add-on does it all. Initially I used this mostly for viewing images on deviantart and goggle images because I wanted occlusion and isolation from any background stuff (full immersion). But now deviantart implemented its own way of doing that and ive found new tricks to use in google images. You may still find it cool. Its kinda like Vista Aero.

FoxyTunes - Play music while surfing? Who doesn't. Hate to alt tab to you music player to switch songs or lower volume? Now it will be easy to do in your browser statusbar. A little trick is to go to the foxytunes mainmenu>configuration>show/hide buttons and hide all except playback controls, separators and volume. Will make it sleek and get rid of the never used buttons.

Forecastfox - For weather. self explanatory.

Stylish - This will be a lengthy one because its awesome. This add-on allows you to create a code or use a pre-made code to change how things are laidout in your browser. We are talking from how goggle search looks like to how a complete remake of how facebook looks. The wonderful thing is that you can edit the codes to your liking, if you know how (Night will appreciate this). Site to get more codes: userstyles.org Some of codes that I use are:

   about:blank Dark Firefox - changes how about:blank pages looks, to something more interesting than, well, nothing :P

   Facebook - Dark shiny blue, transparency - changes how facebook looks. There are others to choose from but I like this one.

   Goggle widescreen - changes how searches appear when you remove ads. How searches go the extra mile and stretch to the end of the screen for widescreen friendly users.

    Google Images (Alternative Dark) - changes the background of google image search page to black, for easier image viewing

    IMDB widescreen - same as google searches but now for imdb.com website. More things are seen and take up less screen space.

    YouTube Simple - removes the things I believe are unnecessary like comments, ratings, and suggested videos (keeps related windows).

    YouTube Cleaned Up - removes more useless things such as ads and other things you dont want.

   *EDIT* YouTube darkened theater style - makes background for youtube black.

    YouTube Dark Carbon Theme - darkens background of youtube and centers the video, for a real video experience *EDIT*

   Youtube real HD - resizes HD videos to the right size (720p vids take up 720 pixels). Gives true HD capability to Youtube.

You may find other add-ons more useful to your needs. Good luck in your search. Enjoy Firefox Awesome.

Kind Regards,

Illuminaughty