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Ask HN: your favorite obscure Firefox extensions?
17 points by Herring on May 30, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments
Working definition: anything that's not the first page of popular extensions.

Autocopy - automatically copy selected text to clipboard

Googlepedia - wikipedia results along with google searches

AutoPager - breaking my own rule, but this one's awesome



Did you know that Autocopy just changes "clipboard.autocopy" in about:config to true?


The extension must precede that functionality. I remember stealing some code from it years ago & it was more complex.


Tree-style tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

An absolute must if you love having 50-100+ tabs open. Oddly enough, it works rather well with Tab Mix Plus as well.


Tree-style tabs + Colored Tabs extension is a joy to use. You'd think that Tree-styled tabs would not play nice with other tab extensions but the author makes large efforts to interoperate.


Does it really work better than tab mix plus' multi row? I've used both & I'm not entirely convinced to switch.


wow. 50-100 tabs? I find it useful with less than a dozen.


Favourite: PDF plugin for Mac OS X. This uses the mac's native pdf rendered and makes viewing pdf's a joy rather than a pain. http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

Shameless plug: If you are a google docs user you might want to look gdocsbar [http://www.gdocsbar.com]. an update with some more features like download, is on the works and will be released shortly.


Hide Menubar (alt to show menu bar) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4762

Hide Navigation Bar (F2 to toggle nav bar) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8769

Both are awesome for netbooks. I find hide menubar nice to have even when I do have the space to spare because I use the menu bar so rarely.




Rikaichan -- remarkably detailed Japanese - English dictionary (hover over words to show definitions) http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/


mozrepl This has so much potential. You can telnet into your firefox instance and run javascript commands, on documents and on the chrome. When I get some time I have ideas about integrating this with emacs (there already is mozreply.el , but it does little more than telnetting in).


Abduction: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3408

Let's you take a picture of a part of your page by rearranging a square. Helps so you don't have to go to paint or photoshop to crop your recent screenshot.


It's what i came here to recommend :)

May i also add ImgLikeOpera (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672). Avoid downloading any pics on a page.

My 3gb per month mobile broadband limit here in the UK goes soooo much further with it.


If you do any web development that involves web metrics (Google Analyitics, Omniture, etc.), Omnibug is quite useful:

http://www.rosssimpson.com/dev/omnibug.html


Leechblock:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

Lets me set fairly fine grained time limits on various sites that I'd otherwise spend too much time on.


Surprised that Vimperator (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4891) has not been mentioned yet. Vim for the web !



I'm fairly sure tab mix plus does that.



Mouse Gestures Redox - Emulates Opera mouse gestures and now has rocker gestures for the mac.

http://www.mousegestures.org/

Speed Dial - Emulates the Opera speed dial home page. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810


I used Mouse Gestures Redox for a long while then I switched to firegestures. I can't remember why exactly, I think something to do with speed & a larger library of gestures.


LORI - Life Of Request Info

Awesome plugin for quick/constant perf measurement. It shows how long it took the browser to get the first byte, the total time for page rendering, the total size of page and the total number of requests. For example, for this page, the stats are :

0.160s 0.600s 26.14KB 5 req


Open In Browser : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8207

Will give you the possibility to open a file (especially file that you are sure is text) in Firefox instead of downloading it.


Table tools - useful for sorting and filtering tables inline https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2637


I use Safari more than Firefox these days. But when I use Firefox I quite like Vimperator, especially since I can write simple but functional extensions for it easily.


I loved Hit-A-Hint so much I forked it when the original devoper abandoned it.

http://elder-gods.org/lol


Long Titles used to be essential for reading xkcd, but I think the current Firefox build has it built-in.


clear fields, a small but very useful extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2408




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