All Web 2.0 sites have one thing in common: they need a Web browser. I use
Firefox, and not just because it's a more secure browser with better user interface features. I use it because it has a fantastic plug-in architecture and a whole community of people who are writing plug-ins for it.
It's possible to go completely overboard with Firefox plug-ins, but realistically, most people will probably settle on just a few. I've picked out a few favorites that I use every day.
Previsualizing links with Browster and Tab Preview
Clicking links is so 2005. I recently covered
Browster, an add-on to Firefox (and Internet Explorer) that pops open a window to the Web site that is under each link on your page when you hover over the link. When you mouse back to the original page, the pop-up disappears. On Google, it caches the first couple of links, so checking out search results in pop-ups is nearly instantaneous. A coworker saw my first post on this topic, tried it, loved it, and told me that he told his friends about it and that by letting him know about Browster, I had "saved 300 peoples' arms and hands." It really is that useful.
I really like the idea of not having to mouse-click links to see what's under them. So another tool I use is Tab Preview. With this extension, I can see what's in each browser tab I'm using just by hovering over the tabs.
Tab tools
Speaking of tabs, there's another utility I use constantly:
Tabbrowser Preferences. It lets you tweak the behavior of tabs to your liking. I have it set up so that when I double-click a tab, it closes. That saves me some time.
One plug-in category I don't recommend is a tool that restores your tabs after a crash. Yes, it's nice, if Firefox crashes, to be able to resume your work immediately in all the tabs you had open. But I've found that often it's one of the open pages that caused the crash in the first place, which means that reloading all the pages doesn't help much.
Bookmark sharing with Jeteye and Del.icio.us
Dozens of social bookmarking tools are available. Some of the best are from small start-ups, such as
Jeteye. This is a rich tool with some pretty fancy capabilities, but I just use it to save pages and pictures. If you want all your saved links to be public, a simple
bookmarklet (a button you add to your browser's favorites bar) can interface directly into
Del.icio.us.
Google Notebook can also store pages and links for you, but its sharing features aren't up to snuff.
I was wrong about StumbleUpon
Previously I dismissed
StumbleUpon as a silly time-waster. What this tool does is take you to a somewhat random Web page when you click its toolbar button. I say "somewhat" because it fine-tunes its selections for you based on what you indicate you like and don't like, using voting buttons.
It's silly and it doesn't help you do your job, but nobody can work 24/7. Sometimes we all need to recharge. I've found myself enjoying the pages that StumbleUpon points me to. The toolbar extension makes me a more efficient time-waster. So I can get my brain downtime in faster and get back to work that much more quickly. At least that's how I justify it.
These and other plug-ins can be found at addons.mozilla.org and in Download.com's Firefox Extensions page. Download.com also has two pages of Best Firefox Extensions.
What are your most productive plug-ins?
