My Firefox plug-ins

They say that where Firefox really shines is its ability to extend its functionality through plug-ins. It is not why I use that web browser the most. Below are the plug-ins I use:

– British English Dictionary, Woordenboek Nederlands. Because if left to my own devices, I would call the first plug-in “Brittish English Dictionary.”

– DownloadHelper. I finally decided I wanted to save a Youtube video to my hard disk, and this plug-in lets you do exactly that. Add an encoder, and you extract the MP3 from a music video. Works with every site that has embedded videos, not just Youtube. Seems to have gotten pretty popular, because now that I know what they are there for I see the familiar coloured balls on many computers I come across.

– Exif Viewer lets you see the data that photo cameras and photographers add to online photos, such as exposure, copyright information, and so on. Handy to find out with which brand camera a picture was taken, or if a journalist lies about when a photo was taken. It is possible for photographers to remove that sort of information, but so far most people seem to leave it in.

– Leet Key decodes (and encodes) text from (and to) ROT13, which is sort of a standard way for posting spoilers. That is to say, if you want to write about a movie, but do not wish to spoil plot details for those who haven’t seen it yet, you can opt to encode the spoiler text with ROT13. This method is very little used on the internet, but does seem to have some kind of following, so this plug-in comes in handy every few months or so.

Leet Key encodes and decodes between many more formats, but even though a format like Base64 is popular, you will hardly ever find it on the World Wide Web. Base64 is what is used by e-mail to transport photos and other files over networks, even though the user typically doesn’t get to see the encoding that is used.

– FEBE is a back-up tool for Firefox. I use it mainly to make sure that a fresh Firefox installation on another computer still has all my bookmarks and plug-ins. It is said to be buggy, but the one time I used it, it caused no problems, so maybe they got the bugs out.

Of the plug-ins (or extensions as the Firefox community calls them) mentioned above, I use the dictionaries almost every day, and the Exif viewer regularly.

I also a bunch of the many Firefox plug-ins for web developers (I work as a freelance web developer). These days I would be slowed down considerably if I had to make my money without them. But I won’t bore you with those—as they are business related—except to quickly mention their names: Web Developer, Firebug, Javascript Debugger, Tamper Data, Dom Inspector.

Are there any must-have plug-ins I missed?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 11:53 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.