Extending Yourself

I finally jumped into the Firefox 3 pool with both feet and started playing with all of the add-ons, extensions and greasemoney scripts and I’ve been blown away. It’s mindboggling how much you can do with this browser. Now I understand why Firefox users are such zealots!

There are countless tools you can add to FF to improve your online experience, not only to save time but just to have more fun as well. Here’s a primer for noobs like me.

First and foremost, get thine a real browser: Firefox or Flock 2.0 Beta (which uses Firefox 3)

Get the Greasemonkey extension at http://www.greasespot.net

Go to http://userscripts.org for the largest collection of scripts for FF & greasemonkey

Here’s a sampling of the best scripts for FriendFeed on Firefox (or Flock 2.0):
Better friendfeed
retaggr card on ff
Add profile page to ff
Add favicons to ff rooms
Add Twitter client with counter to ff
Filter FF by Service

There are also countless tools for enhancing your twitterXperience such as this one:
Retaggr card on Twitter profile
This is what it did to DemoGirl’s twitter profile (added her Retaggr card)

There are also many scripts for other sites like YouTube like the Download YouTube videos script
and Flickr such as the Flickr Group Organizer

There are scripts for just about every site and service you can think of! Just type in the service you want to enhance and you will see a bevy of options available! StumbleUpon, Medium, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, you name it!

If all that weren’t enough, you still haven’t checked out the jaw-dropping FireFox Add-on library!
These are even easier to install because it doesn’t require the greasemonkey script. Simple click install and it’s done.

Here are some very useful Surfing Tools
Tab Mix Plus (MUST HAVE!)
Save to Delicious
Sync Bookmarks on multiple computers
One-Click Auto add to Google Reader (Bypassing igoogle option)

If you want to learn how to create your own scripts then Dive Into greasemonkey!

Videos & Screencasts
DemoGirl serves up warm and toasty screencasts on the best Firefox extensions on a regular basis so visit her blog often.

Here’s an excellent video on Firefox 3
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g30Xyh6Wqc]

Note: By the way, if you’re concerned like I was about doing all this work to install all of these add-ons and scripts EVERY time you have to setup a computer with Firefox (at home, work or anywhere else) then fear no more! Someone came up with FEBE! This cool tool saves all of your extensions and add-ons and backs it up so you can easily re-install them all whenever and wherever you want!

Final Thoughts

The world is your oyster thanks to Firefox and all of its add-ons and scripts. It’s easy to install and best of all, it’s all free!