Productivity Part 3: Firefox Extensions

In Part 3 of my mini series on Productivity, here are my top Firefox extensions.

Firstly why Firefox?! It is my browser of choice, it is more standards compliant at the moment, offers a great tabbed browsing environments and an extremely good view of most of the web sites out there. OK, Firefox 2.0 is not exactly resource friendly, using an amount of memory that it shouldn't. The biggest effect is the open add-on and extension model. None of the other browsers offer the same level of support for third party extensions that Firefox offers. When I am staring at my web browser for much of the day, I need some of these tools to help me get on with things.

Here are my top Firefox extensions:

1. All-In-One Gestures - It is extremely difficult to browse the web these days without the mouse. In fact, try it on something like the BBC site, to see what I mean. Often, no amount of pressing "tab" will get me to the right place and even with Shift+"tab" taking me backwards it doesn't work. Some keyboard commands help but simplest of all is the use of this plug in. Right click and a flick of the mouse opens new windows or tabs, views the source (funny how often this is used just to be nosy!), refresh or close the current tab. Everything could be done but my top commands all use this mouse gesture command line.
2. Google Reader Notifier -I subscribe to maybe fifty RSS feeds and keeping up to date can be a problem. But Google reader notifier highlights how many articles I have to read. I don;t usually take time out to read unless I have 20 which I can comfortably process in less than 30 minutes.
3. IETab - for those sites (named and shamed to be mainly Microsoft sites including Windows update!) that simply refuse to work in Firefox, this opens up and IE 7 tab in my Firefox. A button in the status bar lets you toggle between FF and IE7, great for a quick check of rendering when changing any CSS. It also has a built in store of URL's to always open initially in IE7 - windows update then works when my default browser isn't IE7!!
4. Tab Mix Plus - gives an additional functionality to the tabbed browsing experience!
5. URL Link - Don't you just hate it when you see a web address that isn't a link! By selecting it and right clicking I can open the link as if it were a hyper link!
6. Web Developer tool bar - this is definitely one for the web developers out there - priceless in the various browser check you need to do.
7. Firebug - debugging Javascript is a real pain, this at least takes some of that pain away, as well as giving you DOM based analysis and CSS handling and live editing!
8. Del.icio.us sidebar extension - this is brilliant as I manage all my bookmarks here. I get them all, nicely tagged anywhere.
9. Live PR - displays the current Google Page rank for the page you are on! Nothing but information but something interesting none the less.
10. Fireshot - want to capture the image of a web page and annotate it? This makes it really easy, however doesn't quite support Flash!
11. Colorzilla - an eyedropper for the we, to select color information.
12. Measure IT - a pixel ruler for measuring across web components. Useful in my line of work.

I use others but this I guess is my top 12, those I couldn't do without. Although one not on the list that maybe should be is GMail Notifier, letting me see an outlook style notification when I receive new email (as my Emails are powered by Google Mail) in the Office.

I am sure there are those who will have a different list to this and if any one can suggest others feel free to do so!