Enhancing Firefox functionality

I’ve been using Firefox for a while now
and am really addicted to its extensible
architecture where I can add the feature I
need. There are plenty of cool extensions that we
can use to truly beef up the functionality
of Firefox and take our Internet experience
clear into the geek domain.Read on to digg out
some useful extensions.

Firefox lends itself to extending its
functionality using a range of tiny plug-ins
called extensions. There are extensions
for several applications such as FTP, AD
blocking, mouse gestures, weather and
stock updates, enhanced download
functionality, etc. Some of the must-have
extensions you need to make your Firefox
installation into a power web browser are:

Adblock: Besides speeding up your
web browsing experience, this plug-in
eliminates all web advertising from the
web pages your browse through. It works
by referencing a list of known advertising
web sites and selectively blocking content
from these sites which appear on other
pages in the form of banner Ads, popups,
etc. The list can be modified to incorporate
future inclusions as well.

All-in-One Gestures: Once you start using
it, there’s no looking back—using your
mouse, you can define specific movement
patters to execute tasks during your web
browsing experience. This enables you to
virtually control your surfing using just the
mouse, where you can browse through
pages, navigate between open web sites,
close web sites and move forward and
backward within them with just a flick of
your wrist.


Tabbrowser Preferences: Tab browsing
is one of the best pieces of functionality
in Firefox. This extension extends this
functionality by giving you greater control
on how tabs appear, where they appear
and how links within them are handled.

FoxyTunes: For all you music junkies out
there, how would you like to control your
MP3 player software from your browser
itself? FoxyTunes lets you do just that—it
hooks into popular MP3 players like iTunes
and Windows Media Player and offers full
audio control from a toolbar in the browser
itself. Very handy.

IEView: There are some web sites that
aren’t Firefox-friendly. For these, you can
open them in a dedicated window using
this extension.

Google Toolbar for Firefox: It’s been
around for a while, but this version is
now officially released and supported
by Google. This Google-enabled Firefox
extension lets you search from within the
interface itself.

Gmail Notifier: Just like your local
e-mail client, this extension provides a
notification each time you receive mail on
your Gmail account. Neat

Flashblock: If you’re bogged down by
those Flash-heavy web sites that slow
down your surfing experience, this
functionality banishes them to digital
oblivion!