William Hook’s Blog

I thought I’d write an article about the Firefox extensions that I used, after totally coming up with the idea myself. It’s my idea, I swear!

All the extensions below are fully compatible with Mozilla Firefox 3, unless otherwise stated.

Customize Google

This handy extension adds some additional options to tweak Google to your liking, one of which I find very useful is to bypass Google’s annoying click tracking – basically, you can’t right click a link from within the search results and copy the path, instead, you’re copying a Google-based URL which then redirects to the page you want to visit. Plus, it adds some extra options such as removing ads, adding additional links to stuff like WayBackMachine, showing favicons in the search results, and so on.

Favicon Picker

If a site you visit doesn’t have a favicon, yet you visit it often and want to put it in your bookmarks toolbar, it won’t have a favicon visible. This annoys me, so, I generally always change the favicon if it’s either ugly, or doesn’t exist. Sadly, this extension does not work on Firefox 3, last time I tried, which is a pity (enabling it crashed Firefox for me). If anyone has a fix, please do share it.

Update: Just found out there’s actually a Favicon Picker v3, which can be found here.

Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer

An invaluable tool (saved my owned bookmarks several times in the past from ‘accidents’), which backs up your bookmarks to either Foxmarks’ site or your own FTP server. Also very handy if you have multiple PCs, and don’t want the fuss of keeping them updated all the time.

FxIF

My latest extension, thanks to Pandya’s aforementioned article, this shows EXIF data for images – stuff like the camera model, apeture, and so on. Pretty simple really. Example photo used can be found here.

Greasemonkey

This highly useful extension enabled the modification of various web pages, to enhance them or change the layout or feel. I use a couple of Grasemonkey scripts including Flickr Rich Edit, Flickr Buddy Icon Reply, Flickr Camera Images, Flickr Multi Group Sender, and deviantART MCF Bypass.

President Bush Countdown

Not really useful, but it shows that he’ll be kicked out of office soon. Hurrah!

Server Spy

Shows what software the server is running. For example, on my blog: Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635. See the above President Bush screenshot to see what Server Spy looks like in the status bar, too.

ShowIP

Another server tool, this shows what IP address the server is that hosts the site. Again, as an example, my blog is on 91.186.27.166. It’s also intelligent, and shows any additional IPs for that site if you require so. See the above President Bush screenshot to see what ShowIP looks like in the status bar, too.

Stylish

Similar to Greasemonkey, but more for modifying the look and feel of sites then adding features. I use a couple of Stylish scripts including Firefox 3 Mac OS X – Favicons on Bookmark Bar, Flickr Vista Fonts, and IMDb – dark blue redesign.

User Agent Switcher

For stubborn sites that refuse to let me in because I use Firefox / OS X.

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Anyway, that’s all I use, feel free to suggest any more, or, post your own in the comments.