Monday, March 20, 2006

firefox extensions

I've been using firefox since its early beginnings ;) but never got round to seriously using any of the extensions, guess I was happy within firefox itself. Every time I installed some extension, I would run into some problem or the other and after a major fiasco with the session saver, I totally ditched all extensions.

Recently however I have been using some ultra-neat extensions that make my browsing life a lot easier.

Switchproxy

I keep switching between a bunch of proxy servers, our main squid proxy, my socks tunnel to bypass the main squid proxy, a local squid that does my authentication and a squid that is hosted in the hostel area. Before switchproxy came along, life was a nightmare and I had to manually edit the proxy settings everytime I needed to change.

RefControl

Refcontrol again was an extension that I searched for in an hour of need. I was like 'hacking' ;) into some poorly written jsp based server that maintained authentication and a bunch of other stuff by checking referrers. I was wondering if I'd need to hack up some http request code when I found refcontrol that makes the whole process trivial.

Sage

rss and atom feeds have been around for some time, but I never went beyond firefox's live bookmarks. I was too lazy to install a separate aggregator. Anyway, I found Sage, and have since fallen in love with it. Slashdot, Digg, google news and a bunch of blogs are now a click away to a pretty and cute sage generated page.

Reveal

Reveal is the only one of my eye-candy extensions, and were it not so cute, I would have scrapped it the moment I installed it. What reveal does is that it makes a page of thumbnails of all your windows/tabs. It does a lot more, but that is the bottomline, totally worth cheking out.

BugMeNot

just check the link out

DOM Inspector

DOM inspector comes builtin in firefox, you choose to install it when you install firefox. If you know what DOM is, you can guess what the dom inspector is. It has been in mozilla and firefox since forever and is extremely useful for any web developer.

TabMixPlus

Adds a host of functions to, like session management(that works), merging windows, locking tabs etc.

2 comments:

Kartik said...

Yeah I have problems with some extensions too...
There is another useful extension called UserAgentSwitcher that lets you toggle what the browser tells the server about it... like http://www.asianage.com/ ... if you try to access it using firefox... it doesnt allow access simply because it knows that this is a firefox browser ... but using this extension you can fool the server into thinking that you're using IE :)
Also on Sage... I suggest that you use an online RSS aggregator.. I've just started using bloglines.com and it totally rocks :)

shrek said...

oye find out proper sol to hte memory leakage. I have set the config to cut down mem when minimized and the cached pages to 2 instead of 8, but the effect is my browsing seems too slow these days.