Marti's blog

One nice thing about Firefox is the possibility to extend it with plugins. There are now quite a lot of them around, but some of them can make your life a lot easier. Here's my top 5 favorite ones:

1. Firebug No Web developer can live without this one: it's a complete and very polished web debugging package. Explore your HTML code and watch what CSS properties are in use (and edit them on the fly to see how the page changes). Debug Javascript with breakpoints and step-by-step execution. Watch how the browser fetches the images and files that make up your web page. It's all there and more. How did I ever live without it ?
2. Sage Once you are used to RSS feeds to keep track of your favorite programs, you can't go back. There are a million RSS reader out there, but Sage has the advantage of integrating nicely into Firefox by using normal bookmarks to track feeds and a sidebar to show them. It's simple, clean and elegant.
3. Dictionnaries Few people know that you can have a live spell checker inside Firefox in many different languages (even though it was a touted feature when the 2.0 version was released). Those offered here are not perfect but they'll greatly improve the quality of your posts in blogs and forums.
4. DownThemAll! If you need to download a bunch of files from a web page (images, articles, etc.), this is the extension for you! It's highly configurable and you can set it up to check for certain file types or follow certain links.
5. AdBlock This must be by far the most popular Firefox extension. Firefox has a simple built-in image blocker but AdBlock offers a lot more options and capabilities than just blocking pictures. However I do not personally use it because ads are what make the web mostly free, and once in a while I actually find a valuable site with the help of a good ad. But for those who are too annoyed by it, this is the ultimate solution.