So last week I promised Stig, a Norwegian living in London, that I'd get off the political blogging this week. Haven't achieved that yet, so here's a start.
I use the Firefox browser constantly and one of the reasons is that you can install useful extensions that add functionality. Some of these are incredibly valuable to me, helping enormously with my work. Some are just a nice convenience. Here's the extensions I use. What ones do you use?
Adblock
Plus and Adblock
Filterset.G Updater
Advertising never really bothered me until the day some bright spark
at Hotwired discovered the animated GIF. Ever since, I've filtered
them out. I just can't stand having some annoying, flashing animation
beside something I'm trying to read. I don't filter out static ads
like Google, as they're often quite relevant. Just the annoying
ones. I used to use Craig's Squid
filtering system but doing it in the client, particularly when
Filterset.G automatically gets most of them, makes more sense. What's
more, I can turn it off if there's a false positive.
Web
Developer
I use this nearly every day for my work. It's just invaluable if
you're developing web stuff. There's more features than you can
imagine, but the ones I use most are:
- Edit CSS: edit the stylesheets live, see the result immediately
- View Generated Source: shows the HTML after any scripts have run.
- Display Element Information: shows all kinds of details about any object you point at.
- Display Div Order: outlines all the divs on the page, so you can see what they look like.
Net
Usage Item
Australia has bandwidth charging, so most ISP plans have a quota of
downloads. This extension downloads your usage for the current month
and displays a handy graph.
Forecastfox
Shows the weather. Handy, and does what you'd expect.
Live HTTP
Headers
Shows you all the traffic going on between the server and the browser,
which is absolutely essential when doing some web work.
FoxyProxy
A really cool proxy server manager. Sometimes you need to have your
browser session come from a different location, so you can set up a
rule for which requests go through which proxy. When diagnosing
problems (like our lousy MS ISA proxy servers at work) it's really
handy to be able to push all content through a particular proxy. You
could also use this to get around filtering proxies, but that would be
naughty and possibly career-limiting.
Sydney
Dams Item
We Sydney people are obsessed with the amount of water in our dams.
Comes from living in a dry country. Doesn't help that we get plenty
of rain in the city, but not a lot where the dams actually are. This
extension shows the latest data.