The Hyperlogos

Every so often, a new release of Firefox comes out, and a number of my favorite Firefox extensions fail to work, sending me off on a quest for a handful of replacements. As well, my requirements change over time, and the set of extensions in which I am interested shifts. This is the set of extensions I'm using with the Firefox 3.5 series.

Aardvark is a Firefox extension that permits you to perform a live edit on a webpage prior to printing or saving. Its primary purpose is to permit you to remove elements from the page, but it will also strip color, "de-widthify" (strip the width from the HTML elements) and perform a handful of other functions. It's a nice companion to Scrapbook which will allow you to capture whole pages, or capture a selection, but not to omit chosen elements from a page.

AdBlock Plus is an ad-blocker that actually removes items from web pages. Not only do you not see the ad, but in most cases, you don't even have a hole in the spot from which the ad was removed. Since it's never loaded, no bandwidth is used by the ad, either. Relatively recent versions of this extension do network updates, so you no longer need an additional extension for updates (e.g. AdBlock Filterset.G Updater.)

The All-In-One Sidebar puts a lot of common functionality into a sidebar, instead of pop-up windows. It's most suitable for users with high screen resolution. History, bookmarks, downloads, extensions, themes... I find it to be much more convenient, although you do occasionally find yourself resizing it to get access to some of the buttons.

AutoHideStatusbar is one of my recent attempts to regain screen real estate since I ditched my laptop and picked up netbooks. When configured correctly, it will prevent the status bar from stealing the bottom of your screen any time you don't really want it to be there.

AutoPager is a handy-dandy extension which uses JavaScript to eliminate page breaks. It's difficult to create new rules, but AutoPager also includes a mechanism for fetching other people's page rewriting rules so that you often don't have to. It's one possible solution to articles stretched over dozens of pages for no reason other than to increase the number of page loads.

Compact Menu 2 is the other primary means I've used to get back screen real estate; it condenses all Firefox's menus into a single icon. There are other extensions which do essentially the same thing, but this is the prettiest and requires the least manipulation of menu items. I now use this extension even on my desktop system, where I can afford a menu bar, simply because it is a waste of space.

CS Lite is the semi-abandoned (but still working) "lite" version of CookieSafe. It retains all important features, but consumes less memory. Like its predecessor, it permits you control over which sites may set and retrieve cookies.

Default Full Zoom Level is an addon for very high- or low-resolution displays, which permits you to set the default zoom level without monkeying with font settings; this makes it far easier to view websites "as designed" while still being able to see content on your screen. It remembers per-site settings, so you can have different default zoom levels for different websites. This is a necessity both for very large and very small screens.

FireGPG is a fantastically helpful extension which adds PGP encryption support to gmail via GPG. It can disable saving of drafts to prevent gmail from receiving your unencrypted partial messages, making it a realistic way to keep your data private even when using web email.

Fission is an extension inspired by Apple's browser Safari, which colors the background of the Address bar to provide a status bar. Besides being pretty, it eliminates the one last reason to even have a status bar, once you put the icons for certain extensions in the toolbar (e.g. CS Lite, Noscript) so that you can access their functions.

NoScript is a Firefox extension which prevents untrusted websites from engaging in potentially dangerous activity in your web browser. It can be a bit frustrating to use as it seems that most websites now malfunction if you do not permit Javascript, but it is also by far the safest way to browse the web. It also includes the functionality of several other extensions, including Flashblock.

Internet explorer has MHT files, which are basically webpages saved as the MIME portion of a MIME email. Scrapbook+ gives Firefox scrapbooks, which is pretty much the same thing as performing a "Save As..." from the File menu, and saving as "Web Page, Complete". Either way, it's a way to easily save a webpage as a single package (in this case, a directory.) Scrapbook+ has import/export capabilities; you don't need them to copy a scrapbook someplace but they do make it much easier (due to the types of directory names used by Scrapbook+) and exporting from one profile and then importing into another preserves metadata like the original URL. This is a better-supported, lighter version of Scrapbook.