Blog Marco

As a regular IE (Internet Explorer) user, I originally installed Mozila Firefox because of it's very useful toolbar - "Web Developer Extension" - Which allows you to quickly view the source, view CSS, verify your CSS and HTML, resize, hide or make images invisible, view div class details - AND MORE! A very effective tool if you are developing a website.

Now, I only used Firefox to design and maintain my website and I continued to use IE for general surfing purposes.

I tell you - never again will I use IE. IE simply has too many loopholes for viruses to infiltrate your computer (or so I've heard). But the one thing that drew me to Firefox was the added functionality from other Firefox extensions just like the additional toolbar mentioned above.

Did I mention that Firefox is FREE? - It's GPL and is supported by a community of developers online.

The number one Firefox Extension that drew me was the Advertising blocker. This Ad blocker needs to be "trained" in that it can be told what elements of the page you want to block out. Two sites that I regularly frequent is smh.com.au and mail.yahoo.com.au, which are a newspaper website and a mail website respectively. Basically in the first 5 minutes of installing it I was able to block out the advertising on both these websites. No more wasted bandwidth. No more of those pop up flash ads that are so annoying!

so what did I block? In the filters I blocked out:
http://www.smh.com.au/js/adSwap.js
http://ffxcam.fairfax.com.au/html.ng/*
http://au.adserver.yahoo.com/*

Simple. (For medium to advanced users that is)

The SearchStatus Firefox extension is a novelty item where you have a bar that simply shows a representation of what Google (Pagerank) and Alexa search engines thinks about the relevance and importance of the site you are currently on.

This extension has little practical use to the general user, but for SEO (Search Engine Optimiser) specialists it means everything.
SearchStatus - Displays Google Page Rank and alexa ranking.

Another novelty item is also for people in the know - httpliveheaders display the headers your browser is sending and receiving.
httpliveheaders

A final extension for Firefox that I've installed but haven't had the chance of testing out is Greasemonkey. From the general description I gathered that this extension optimises your web surfing experience by allowing the user to change how a website looks like. The scripts to be used with the extension are available here.

I've only scratched the tip of the iceberg. There are many more useful Firefox extensions out there free for the taking - depending on what you really want to do to optimise your web surfing experience ;)

Other useful Firefox Extenisons

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