Somewhere along the line, the browser
stopped being an application to view Web pages and the occasional bit
of multimedia, and became a vital part of the daily workflow for
millions of users. Since you’re probably already spending much of your
workday using Firefox, why not add to its functionality and increase
your productivity even more?
Firefox supports extensions, plugins, and themes — which are
collectively called “add-ons.” This probably isn’t news to anyone who’s
been using Firefox for more than a few days, but what might not be
obvious is which extensions would be most useful. It’s a bit
subjective, but I’ve tried to highlight ten of the most useful
extensions for professional Linux users. This means I’ve slanted the
choice of extensions to ones that extend productivity rather than
social media extensions like Power Twitter.
Though other browsers do support extensions, widgets, etc., Firefox
has by far the largest selection of bolt-on features of any Web
browser. The Mozilla folks have done a really good job of creating a
platform for development that has made the browser far more than an
application for displaying Web pages. Let’s take a look at what Firefox
has to offer.
Mix and Match Extensions
Before we get started on our tour of useful extensions, let me step back and give a few words of caution. Firefox itself is usually
a stable beast, but when you start adding extensions, things can get
unstable in a hurry. Especially when you start installing a bunch of
extensions.
While I’ve tried and enjoyed all of the add-ons here, I don’t run them all at the same time.
Keeping the number of add-ons that are installed and active at any
given time has kept my browser reasonably stable. (Conversely, I’ve
found that when Firefox crashes frequently, it’s usually solved by
turning off or unininstalling one or more extensions.)
But what if you want to try out a new extension or have different
sets of extensions for different tasks? Managing extensions by turning
them off and on can be a major hassle, especially since it requires a
restart of the browser — but there is a solution.
Firefox allows you to have one or more profiles, and each profile
can have its own set of add-ons. Not only can you run separate
profiles, with each having its own set of extensions, you can run
multiple instances of Firefox using different profiles.
Here’s how it works. Shut down Firefox and run the following:
firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote
This will pop up the Firefox Profile Manager, and you can configure new profiles or choose existing ones to run.
The default profile will be started automatically when you load Firefox if you don’t issue the -ProfileManager or -P ProfileName argument. If you’d like to bypass the Profile Manager and just start a different profile, just run firefox -P ProfileName argument.
Nightly Tester Tools
If you’re reading this article, odds are you like to have the latest
and greatest features. With Firefox, that means running alphas, betas,
release candidates, and even nightly builds rather than the stable
releases.
I’ve found that stability usually isn’t a problem in this scenario,
but you’ll often run into extensions that “aren’t compatible” with the
latest version of Firefox. Sometimes this is due to genuine
incompatibility, other times it’s because the extension author hasn’t
verified the extension against the latest releases and the extension
hasn’t been marked compatible with the version number in use.
If it’s just a matter of version numbers, you can use the Nightly Tester Tools to override this and run the extension anyway.
That’s not the only advantage to the Nightly Tester Tools, of
course. In addition to making it easy to use “incompatible” extensions,
the tools are useful to developers who want to work on Firefox and
extensions.
You can view previous crash reports, copy a list of installed
extensions to the clipboard, display build information in the titlebar,
take screenshots of Firefox, and more.
Greasemonkey
All Web pages are not created equal. In fact, some sites could use a
little help, or a lot. You could lobby the site owners to make
improvements, or you could use Greasemonkey to make the improvements yourself.
Greasemonkey stores and runs scripts for specific Web sites. You can
either create your own script and use it, or grab scripts from Userscripts.org.
Once you’ve installed Greasemonkey, you can install scripts in much the same way you install extensions to Firefox.
You can employ Greasemonkey scripts to make your Bugzilla more useful, add features to Twitter, open GMail for mailto links, and many other hacks.
Platypus
Greasemonkey is nice, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to create
your own scripts quickly without having to fuss with JavaScript? Good
news is, you can. The Platypus extension makes it easy to create simple
Greasemonkey scripts to modify Web pages.
The Platypus extension
provides a toolbar with several tools that allow you to manipulate
objects on a site. For example, you can use Platypus to isolate a piece
of a Web page so you don’t have to put up with ads and unnecessary
cruft around the content you want to view.
You can also modify HTML on a page, view the source for a specific
area of the page, and make all kinds of modifications without having to
write any JavaScript whatsoever.
Platypus isn’t perfect. I’ve had mixed success creating Platypus
scripts for various pages — for example, I didn’t have a lot of luck
creating a script to display only the results column of a custom Google
News search failed to do anything after I saved the script. However,
more often than not, the scripts work perfectly — though you may need
to edit the URL for affected pages by adding a wildcard.
Xmarks
If you use more than one computer, keeping bookmarks and passwords
synched between the machines can be a bit of a hassle. Actually, it can
be a major hassle, unless you’ve got something like Xmarks at your
fingertips.
Xmarks is an extension that provides the ability to sync bookmarks
and passwords, backup and restore bookmarks, and provide access to your
bookmarks from the Xmarks Web site. In addition, you have the ability
to set up profiles, so you can separate your personal and work bookmarks if you want to.
As an added bonus, the Xmarks service should work with IE and Safari
in the near future. If you use more than one browser for work or fun,
you should be able to sync your bookmarks across all three browsers in
the near future.
Nervous about saving your bookmarks and passwords with a third party? It’s possible to use Xmarks with your own server instead.
Evernote
The Internet puts tons of information at your fingertips, but
organizing it — that gets a bit tricky. Even though bookmarks can be
useful for some info you find online, sometimes you need more than a
pointer back to a Web page. For that, you can use Evernote. Evernote
can help you manage all the information you find online, plus personal
files, notes, and much more.
The Evernote extension works in conjunction with the Evernote service.
Basic accounts are free, so you won’t break the bank by signing up.
(Though you’ll be limited to 40MB and have to put up with ads for the
basic service.)
Use is simple. The extension comes with a toolbar button and adds an “Add to Evernote” item to the context menu.
The extension allows you to clip Web pages, or even just parts of
Web pages. This is particularly useful when you stumble onto a site
that has useful instructions for troubleshooing a problem or solving a
thorny programming problem. Find a forum post that has just the
solution you need? Highlight the part of the page you want to save and
click the “Evernote” button or use the context menu.
In addition to saving the material from the Web site, you can add
notes and tags to the raw text, so you can put material in context and
save your thoughts on Web pages for later. (It’s handy feature for
writers, too…)
Vimperator
The world is made up of two kinds of people: Those who’ve accepted
Vim as the one true text editor, and those who have settled for
inferior methods of editing text. While Vim users can enjoy perfection
when working on code, config files, and the like, they have to settle
for inferior shortcuts when using other programs — including Web
browsers.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, at least not entirely. While plain vanilla Firefox doesn’t include Vim support, the Vimperator
add-on allows you to bring the modal editing greatness of Vim to
Firefox. This means you can add Vi-like keybindings to Vim and control
the browser entirely, or very nearly entirely, from the keyboard.
What does that mean, exactly? Vimperator gives Firefox Vim-like
keybindings, Ex-type commands, a more minimal GUI, count support for
commands, marks for Web pages, and even the ability to set up Macros.
Vimperator can be extended with scripts, too.
Vimperator initially hides the toolbar and navigation bar. If you prefer to have these available, you can re-enable them with :set go+=mTB. See the wiki and access Vimperator’s tutorial using :help.
Even for experienced Vim users, it can take a while to get used to
Vimperator. This is one of the extensions that works best in a separate
profile until you get fully used to it. Also, note that Vimperator’s
keybindings may conflict with the keybindings for some Web sites, like
GMail or Google Reader.
Prism
Most of us have one or more Web applications we use extensively
throughout the day. It can be useful to split these out of the regular
browsing experience into their own “application,” using Prism.
Formerly known as Webrunner, Prism is an extension from Mozilla Labs
that let’s you create a single use instance of Firefox as a desktop
application. Just grab the extension and browse to the site that you’d
like to run separately. Go to Tools -> Convert Website to
Application and you’ll get a dialog to choose the URL, name of the
application, icon, and the location of the shortcut.
After you’ve created the Prism application, you can launch it
separately and run one or more instances of Prism while still using
Firefox normally. If you restart Firefox (or it crashes) for some
reason, the Prism instances will be unaffected. Likewise, if you end
your Prism session, it won’t have any effect on the running Firefox
session.
Launchy
As nice as Firefox is, sometimes it’s not the right application for the job. To augment Firefox’s features, you can use Launchy
to configure Firefox to open Web pages in new applications, use
external apps for FTP and download, external editors, and view media in
external players.
The only letdown with Launchy for Linux users is the lack of application autodetection. If you want to use Launchy, you have to edit the launchy.xml file and tell it where to find the applications you want to use.
Google Gears
Web-based applications are great, but typically not so useful when
you’re offline. If you depend on Web-based apps, it can be somewhat
inconvenient trying to get work done on those cross-country flights.
For a small subset of applications, though, you can use Google Gears — a framework that allows Web application developers to enable offline use as well as the usual online use.
Despite the name, Google Gears can be used with non-Google
applications — so, even if you’re not using any Google services, you
may still find use for Gears. Sites like Remember the Milk and
WordPress.com work with Gears, in addition to Google’s GMail, Reader,
Google Docs, and others.
When you load a Web application that supports Gears, it may ask
permission to use Gears, or you may have to enable Gears manually. You
can choose to enable or deny Gears, or to never allow the site if you
don’t want to see the dialog again. After enabling Gears, it will
download some data to enable the application to work offline, and then
you’re off to the races. You’ll be able to work offline and synchronize
data when you’re online again.
Ubiquity
Last, but definitely not least, is Ubiquity.
Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs project to allow “on-demand, user-generated
mashups,” a command-line browser tool that gives fast and easy access
to a number of tools and sites.
After Ubiquity is installed, you’ll have a hotkey to display the Ubiquity interface. This is usually Alt-Space, but can be modified. Go to about:ubiquity to change the shortcut to invoke Ubiquity and then take the Ubiquity tutorial to get the basics.
A couple of quick examples. If you want to search Wikipedia for a term, just hit Alt+Space
and enter the search term. To translate a section of text, highlight
the text you want to translate and then type “translate” and then the
language you want to translate it to.
From Ubiquity, you can quickly compose emails using Gmail, look up
strings in Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, and many others, map addresses,
create bookmarks, and a lot more.
Ubiquity isn’t limited to the commands that come pre-installed. You can create your own, or search for new commands created by “The Ubiquity Herd.”
Note that these scripts are not vetted officially by Mozilla, so you’re
taking some risk in installing them to run in your browser.
About:End
Of course, Firefox has hundreds of useful extensions, but these are
the ones I’ve found to be most useful over time. New ones, however, are
being created every day. It’s well worth checking out the Firefox
Add-Ons site on a regular basis, or just browsing the recommended
add-ons displayed when you go to Tools -> Add-ons. You’ll find
plenty of new and interesting extensions to improve Firefox.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is Managing Editor for
Linux Magazine and the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell. His blog is at
zonker.opensuse.org.
