The 5 Most Awesomest Firefox Add-ons

Firefox is my browser of choice. With the exception of my little affair with Chrome (we all went a little wild when it came out, didn't we?) I have been using it for more than three years.

And truly, if it left me I might die.

Like any good lover or Web productivity tool, Firefox has submerged itself into my everyday Internet experience. Certainly, it has changed the way I live my life.

The best thing about Firefox, which is one of the most successful open source programs out there, are the browser add-ons. The ability to customize my online environment using tools made by people who do the same kinds of things I do every day means I get useful tools. YAY!

Add-ons save me time and that makes me look awesome in the eyes of my clients. They give me the geek cred I crave when my colleagues erupt with gleeful schoolgirl giggling when I share newly discovered Firefox add-on nuggets of productivity deliciousness. From the boys even.

(Passionate love for a community-coded productivity app isn't weird, right? You know what? I don't care. True love needs no explanation.)

I've poured over my very long extensions list and culled it down to the 5 Firefox add-ons that I find absolutely invaluable. That have changed the way I do things on the Web. (Okay, there are actually many more, but for the sake of the average Internet reading attention span, let's stick to 5.)

The 5 Most Awesomest Firefox Add-ons

Apture Editor
[video]

With one line of code I can make interactive, multimedia infused, non-intrusive panels on any of my blogs thanks to Apture. The links in this very post -- which activate panels of related information upon click or mouseover to show videos, Web pages, even widgets -- were created in very little time.

Apture not only creates custom panels of content that popup quietly, these panels show any related content you may find and lists them as thumbnails along the bottom of the panel. You can use any of the numerous available types of searches for content to link to in any panel. Anything you want, from numerous sources. You can also point to any custom url or embed a widget in a panel.

Try it out (click the Edit this Page button)

Zotero
[video]

This amazing Firefox extension was developed by the Center of New Media and History to help students collect, manage, and cite research sources for their papers in 2006. But its amazing capacity as a reference maintenance software is only the beginning.

It automagically stores whole Web pages and anything on a Web page (PDFs, files, media, links) for labeling, tagging, and categorizing. The export function allows one-click bibilographies, indexes and project data that is already formatted and code-clean. The customizable user interface makes it very easy to work with while collecting data, and it plays nice with other Web tools and and word processing applications.

I use Zotero to manage my bajillion different projects, which runs the gamut between creative to technical, so it's not just for scholars needing to export a thesis bibliography. Even if you're not quite sure how this powerful Firefox extension might be useful to you, you should probably watch the video just to be sure.

Zemanta
[video]

It was love at first sight with Zemanta. Not only does this extention help me build multimedia-rich blog posts and email with nary a hitch, it saves me content development and research time. I don't know about you, but time I manage to save is time I deserve to gain.

Zemanta integrates into your blog post (all the major platforms are supported) and email (just gmail and yahoo at the time of publishing) and provides you with one-click media, hyperlink and tagging capability right inside your blog posting interface. In a single bound, people! It provides instant "share this" type code at the end of each blog posts without needing to type a key. It also tries real hard to only provide content that's not copyright wink-wink questionable.

Get thee on the Zemanta tour to find out more. Once you install it you'll soon be like me, spending all the time you save by figuring out how to spend all the time you save. ;)

Ubiquity
[video]

"...connecting the world with words." This easy to use, keyboard shortcut enabled, community-based mashup experiment changes everything for me.

Ubiquity runs on an open API. To invoke and use it, you execute commands. You select things on a Web page or type in a command. Then it figures out what you are asking of it and allows you to then use whatever it brings back to you in a variety of ways, all without leaving the page you are on. You can ask it to translate, search, map, email content to anybody, check your google calendar/email/to do list/documents, check the news. Yes, you can even Twitter from it.

Ubiquity is beta, it's semantic webby, and it does far more than I've explained here. If you haven't tried it yet, you're missing out. It is a taste of the future of the Web. For seriously.

Web Developer
[video]

At publishing time, there have been 9,958,956 downloads of this add-on, making this FireFox extension one of the most popular out there for those of us who work in Web development. The goodies in its menus will turn you into a productivity messiah in the eyes of clients and free you up to spend that time saved making your projects work juuuuuust right.

The Web Developer browser extension is a toolbar that provides easier ways to do a lot of the usual time intensive subjects. Edit any page's CSS and see your changes live (and locally), displays the page information for pretty much anything you'd want to know on any page on the Internet, disabling cookies and images, code validation, browser resizing...the list goes on and on.

Rmember it's popular for a reason, and that's because it is most awesome,

And so my love affair with Firefox burns on.

But what are YOUR favorites? I wanna know!

Let's go steady!