Monday, December 28, 2009

Customize Firefox and Thunderbird

It's fascinating to discover many useful extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird, which offer unparalleled user experience. Here I'd like to share some examples that I'm using. First please see a list of add-ons for Firefox.
1) Adblock Plus: the web page is much cleaner without the ads.
2) Add-on Compatibility Reporter
3) All-in-One Sidebar: It appears to be incompatible with the default theme when switching the themes, and the development build has the fix.
4) Chromin Frame: bringing the same look and feel as Google Chrome browser.
5) Chromin Tab Behavior
6) CoolPreviews
7) Coral IE Tab: Originally I was using the IE Tab which is not compatible with the new Firefox 3.6; then I switched to the Coral IE Tab. You need to check the developer's web site for the latest add-on.
8) Dafizilla ViewSourceWith
9) Disablemenu
10) Download StatusBar
11) DownloadHelper: quite handy to use when downloading videos.
12) Fission: Fission combines address bar and progress bar (Safari style). This makes the progress bar more visible and allows for a nice visual effect.
13) FoxTab
14) Google Voice Add-on for Firefox: very neat add-on to recognize the phone number on the page and you can click to dial the number via Google voice.
15) gTranslate
16) Locationbar²
17) Map with Google: Originally I was using the Map This extension, but it was no longer working after I installed gTranslate; then I switched to using Map with Google.
18) New Tab King
19) Organize Status Bar: you'll need it as the number of icons are going in the status bar.
20) PluginChecker: Check at application startup if there are plugins installed without user permission
21) Print/Print Preview
22) QuickDrag
23) Tab History
24) Toolbar Buttons
25) User Agent Switcher
26) WebMail Notifier
27) Xmarks

The theme I use for Firefox is the Strata RELOADED.












Then for Thunderbird, I'm using the following add-ons:
1) CompactHeader
2) Display Mail User Agent
3) Forward
4) Hide Menubar
5) Lightning: The Lightning 0.9 is not compatible with Thunderbird 3.0, and I have to use the nightly build.
6) Toolbar Buttons




The theme for Thunderbird is the OWN.