TechgnosisWeb Prime

Update: Check the comments for a few more very useful extensions!
So you’ve finally broken under the pressure. You finally decided that enough was enough, and you went and downloaded Firefox. And you’ve been trying it out, surfing a few pages here and there, maybe trying out that whole ‘tabbed browsing’ thing, and wondering where all the popups have gone. But after a few days, you sit there, staring at your screen, and think to yourself: now what?

I’ll tell you what: Extensions. Part of the beauty of the ‘fox is that hundreds of free and open extensions exist that can turn it into the browser of your dreams, no matter what you have in mind. There are Extensions for everything from special navigation options of individual siutes, to fundamental changes of how Firefox handles certain filetypes. Your best bet is to go to the official Firefox Addons site and hunt around, but I’m going to take the initiative and give you a list of some of the Extensions that I’ve found the most useful. These are extensions I use most every day, and that I can’t do without. I’m sure you’ll find at least one or two here that might be useful to you.

First: VideoDownloader. Are you the type of guy or gal that loves to browse through online video sites such as YouTube and Google Video? Have you ever wished there was a way to download those videos directly to your hard drive rather than having to stream them from the site? Then this is your solution. A little icon that sits at the bottom of your browser screen, and when you find a page with an embedded video you want to download, just hit the button and follow the instructions. In minutes, you’ll have that video file on your desktop. (You might want to check out VLC for playing those .flv format files that most sites seem to use).

Next in line: DownThemAll. Ever been at a gallery site for pr0nart and wished you could just grab every linked jpg without having to click on each one? Ever been at an artist’s website and wished you could download all the mp3’s on his page in one shot? DownThemAll has you covered. From their decription: DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want.

Presenting: IE Tab (and its cousin, IE View). I hate to admit it, but sometimes, you still run across sites that are IE only. These are usually banking sites that haven’t realized how much more secure Firefox is, or pretentious artsy sites designed by folks who have no concept of what the web is really all about. In any case, they don’t let you easily view them in Firefox. Not to worry! With these extensions, you can open IE-only sites in their own, special tab that embeds the IE rendering engine directly into itself, so you can continue to use all the Firefox features you know, without having to switch to that Other browser. And with IE View, you can even designate specific sites to automatically open with IE, so you don’t have to be right-clicking each time you go to them.

And now: Adblock (and the Adblock Filterset.G Updater!). Tired of flashing, spinning, barking ads? Are you going to punch a hole in the wall if you see one more ‘Punch the Monkey’ banner? Adblock is your solution. In combination with the Filterset.G blocklist, it automatically blocks the vast majority of ads on the web, which not only saves your sanity, but makes pages quicker to load. And if an ad ever slips through, just right-click and you can Adblock it on the fly, making sure you’ll never see that ad again.

The one, the only: PDF Download. How annoying is it to click on a link that you think is going to lead to a new page, and then sit there, screen frozen, while the goddamn Adobe PDF reader loads up because the link led to a PDF file? No more! PDF Download intercepts the click and warns you that you just clicked on a PDF, and gives you the option to just save the PDF to file, open it in an external viewer, or even view it as HTML right in the browser! I love this extension.

Behold: The Download Statusbar. The built-in download manager window in Firefox is handy, but it can be annyoing to have it pop up and be floating around while your downloads finish. No more! Now, when you download a file, you can watch its progress through a little statusbar at the bottom of your Firefox window, nice and out of the way, but accesible at a glance. And when the file is done, you can right-click it to open it or go to its folder, or simply clear it out of the queue.

Oh my God, it’s: SessionSaver. It’s happened to all of us. You accidentally closed a tab, and now you can’t get it back. Or maybe you have 20 tabs open, and you need to go, but don’t want to go through the trouble of re-opening all those tabs when you get back. Or maybe the computer crashes, and you lost all your tabs. No longer! SessionSaver allows you to save your opened tabs as a ’session’, and, with a click, bring them all back. If Firefox or the computer crashes, SessionSaver brings your opened tabs back to life the moment you restart the ‘fox. And if you closed a tab you didn’t mean to, you can resucitate the tab with a click on a menu. Fabulous!

Because you demanded it: GMail Manager. Know instantly when new messages show up n your GMail inbox, and access them with a click. Got multiple GMail accounts? We’ve got you covered here too.

Finally: GooglePreview. This one falls under the ‘nifty’ category, but I find it quite useful. It shows a thumbnail image of linked sites when doing Google searches, so you can get a quick glimpse of that the site you’re about to click on looks like before you even go there.

So, that’s it. Just a few of my favorite and most useful Extensions. Hope you find something in there that you like.
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So, what’s better than a still screenshot of the XGL/Compiz eye-candy running on my linux desktop? Why, a video, of course! I finally figured out how to record desktop movies using VLC, so I recorded this short (about 28 seconds) video of some of the neat visual effects, such as the bendy windows, Multiple desktops on different faces of a cube, transparency, videos continuing to play whie being moved and bended, Expose-like effects, and more. Can your Windows or Mac desktop do this?

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Well, it’s been less than two weeks since I announced that I’d be blocking Internet Explorer from the site, and put up the code from ExplorerDestroyer.com on the site, and I’m closing down this little experiment early. Response from users was mixed, at best, and the actual code from the ExplorerDestroyer folks was a buggy mess that didn’t even work half the time, and blocked all sorts of other browsers other than IE, such as Lynx and Opera. So that’s the end of that, the code will be taken down tonight, and it’s back to business as usual.

However, a few interesting tidbits popped up while doing this whole thing: a general resistance to change, even when, on average, it’s for the better. I understand that some people have no choice but to use IE, simply because their IT manager’s made the boneheaded decision to use IE only, or something like that. This question is not for the people who have no choice about what browser to use. This one goes out to the people who simply don’t *want* to change: they have the option, they know it’s there, but they willingly choose to remain using IE. Why not? Honestly, I’m curious. I make no bones about my opinion that Firefox is, in pretty much every way, superior to IE. Faster, more secure, expandable, with better features and usability. I can’t live without tabs anymore, and I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to see ads and pop-ups on the web thanks to the Adblock extension and FF’s built-in popup blocker. While I’m using Linux at home, at the office and at several clients I use Firefox, and have had absolutely zero spyware or virus issues on those machines. Contrast that with the boxes where people continue using IE, which are, usually infected with all manner of spyware, browser bars, so-called search helpers, etc.

So, I honestly want to know, why do so many of you folks willingly stick with IE, especially when you actually know about Firefox (I can understand the people who just don’t know better yet)? Satisfy my curiousity.
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