Upgrading Firefox

[pne]

At work, I recently upgraded Firefox from 1.0.8 to 1.5, and it went pretty smoothly—recognised all my extensions, my saved passwords, my bookmarks, etc.

At home, I still had 0.8 running. This morning, Gmail started hanging on me and I thought this might be a sign to upgrade. Download, install, run—oops, looks as if it's never heard of my previous installation. Bummer.

So I guess I'll be copying over settings and bookmarks over the weekend, as well as installing extensions and perhaps visiting a few sites I go to regularly so that it'll pick up the passwords and cookies.

On the other hand, this might be a good time to start afresh. Does anyone have any favourite Firefox extensions they can recommend to me? What's their name, what do they do, where do you get them from?

Comments

[nassus.livejournal.com]

Adblock - it's one of the most popular list. I have a nice list somewhere you can import for a start if you want me to dig it up (assuming you dont already run this).
and theres a IE emulator for pages that dont do nice standard html which seems to cope better - User Agent Switcher (and that - I've only found under a full search but if you hack the url you can get 100 per page and its about page 4 IIRC)

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

My favorites are Gmail Notifier and Web Developer. The former's function is probably pretty obvious -- it lets you know when you have Gmail. (Of course, this causes obsessive checking of the notifier, but it's better than obsessive checking of the inbox!) The latter is a toolbar with a number of different functions -- you can e.g. edit the HTML or CSS of a page and see how it would look, resize images, view various information about web pages... I haven't discovered everything it does yet, but I like the functions I have discovered.

Here (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/173/) and here (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/).

[pne.livejournal.com]

I have a nice list somewhere you can import for a start if you want me to dig it up

Sure, that'd be nice.

(assuming you dont already run this).

No, I don't.

[nassus.livejournal.com]

www.sevenone.com/~sue/livejournal/adblock.txt save to desktop

once you've got it installed its something like tools/adblock/preferences then adblockoptins/import filters to import it.

You can also block out the shockwave.com ones by changing the specific url to just not show rather than to block which means it works but isnt there to annoy you. I think the list here is a basic one thats a good start. You can easily train it up with adding stuff from sites you go to frequently. Cleans up some pages nicely and leaves you with a nice readable page.

[pthalo]

reloadevery - useful if you play certain games (neopets) and need to reload a page every 5 seconds or every 45 minutes or whatever
sessionsaver - saves your session, so you can leave all sorts of browser windows open
sztakidict - english hungarian translation (highlight a word, right mouse click, translate), probably not as useful for you as it is for me, can't get it through mozilla.org, have to get it through dict.sztaki.hu
adblock - blocks ads
targetalert - when you mouseover a link it shows a little picture that tells you if it's a pdf, a sound file, a link to another site, or a whole bunch of other things. you can set it so it always appends an image, so you don't have to mouseover it
supert - gives lots of options for tab browsing, like displaying them in rows
colorful tabs - colors all of your tabs, which can make it easier to find the one you're looking for if you have lots of browser windows open

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

How odd - I've never had any problems upgrading Firefox.

Extensions? I have loads... let's see what could be useful...

AdBlock, as already mentioned is invaluable, but to further improve it, there's an extension called "Adblcok Filterset.G Updater" - this basically keeps Adblock up-to-date with a huge list of filters that is centrally compiled by loads of users and means almost all commonly known ads get blocked out of the box.

FireFTP - if you do any FTP work, this is a small FTP client that runs in a Firefox window.

DownloadStatusbar - no more popup with download progress - now you get to see what's downloading in a bar at the bottom of your window - you can customise it so that certain filetypes auto-hide themselves once they've finished downloading, etc.

DownloadThemAll - if you have lots of links on a page that you want to download, don't bother clicking on each one - just run this extension, choose which links or embedded objects (pictures, movies, music, anything) you want to download, where to save them to, and it does the rest.

AntiPagination - fed up of keep clicking "Prev" or "Next"? Now you can load several pages and stitch them together with only a couple of clicks.

SearchBox Sync - possibly a bit pointless, I guess, but if you type something into the searchbox (say "fish") and then when the search page comes up, you change your mind and type something else into the page itself (say "flying fish"), it will update the searchbox to contain the new value.

UpdateMonitor - ever forget to update your extensions? Not anymore - this little extension puts a tiny icon in the top right of your FF window, and sits there periodically checking for new versions of any extension you have installed. When it finds some, it changes colour - you can then choose to install some or all of the extensions it's found by just clicking on it. Once done, it will then change colour again to let you know that FF needs to restart (which you can do by clicking on it again).

Bookmark Duplicate Detector - does exactly what it says on the tin!

Form History Manager - don't want to clear out all entered form info just to remove one or two things? No problem - with this extension, you can go through and choose what to keep and what not to.

IE View Lite - not all pages work in FF, so for those that don't, you can view them in IE with one click. If it's a page you visit often, you can set IE View to always load that particular page in IE.

All these can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org (or by clicking "extensions->get more extensions" and having a search around. :)

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

I should add that Gmail notifier obviously doesn't work if two users on the same computer have Gmail. I had to uninstall it when my husband got a Gmail account. It was driving us nuts.

'Fraid the only extension we use is Forecastfox.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

As well as what others have mentioned, I love:

FetchPlainText - you can highlight text-only URLs and it gives a menu context option to open it in a tab/window (name is approximate, as I'm working off my often-faulty memory right now)

All-in-one Gestures - mouse gestures and rocker buttons! I cannot live without rocker buttons now. I keep trying to do it at work by accident.

Both are from the mozilla extensions site.

[volantwish]

Some of mine are bound to be repeats, but here are my favorites:
adblock
show failed URL - shows the URL when a page load fail
target alert - shows what kind of things links point to
IE view - load any page in IE using the target menu...useful for IE-only sites
tabbrowser preferences - gives you more control over tabbed behavior
plain text links - highlight a text URL to open it
download statusbar - keeps download progress visible, with optional virus-scan
down them all - download multiple links on a page at once.

I think I got all of these from the official extensions page.

[conuly]

Adblock Plus is better.

[conuly]

Adblock Plus (of course)
Reload Every
EasyGestures - that gives you a circular menu when you right click. Nifty.

Adblock Plus

[pne.livejournal.com]

What are its advantages over plain Adblock?

Does it work with the Filterset.G updater as well?

Re: Adblock Plus

[conuly]

For one, they're updating it, and I'm not sure they're updating Adblock anymore.

And yes, it does.

Re: Adblock Plus

[conuly]

Also, it fixes some flash-related glitches Adblock had. That's why I switched.

Everything else "better" is something subject to interpretation, so I won't list that.