Best Free Firefox Add-ons

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What is so great about Firefox?

Firefox is the browser of choice for many keen Internet users and is one of the best browsers available (if not the best). It comes from the Mozilla organization, who have been involved in browser creation for longer than most. Firefox has a number of advantages:

1. Firefox is open-source. That means anyone can contribute, view the source code and even develop their own versions of Firefox! This openness makes the quality extremely high.
2. It is standards-compliant. It does actually view a web page in the way browsers are supposed to. It's easy to create web pages for it as very few additional workarounds are needed.
3. Firefox is more secure than the older generation of browsers. This is important now as online threats are also stronger. There is no such thing as a perfect software application, or a totally secure one - but the important points are the quality of the core application, and the speed with which newly-found vulnerabilities are patched. In both these areas Firefox is hard to beat.

As a matter of fact it comes with overwhelming features out of the box, and yet, you can make it even better by adding extensions to it to suit your needs. Note that there will also normally be a major beta version of Firefox in parallel existence at any time, so we need to install the addons which are compatible with the Firefox version being used. Firefox add-ons are of two broad classes, Extensions and Themes, and there are also plug-ins. Anyone can create a Firefox addon-on or theme, even you can give it a try if you invest the time in understanding how it all works!

We are constantly updating this list with our most reccomended addons we think you should have! If you have one that isn't on this list, feel free to share it in the comment section below! Also if you have anything you want me to add to the article then please post!

And a Big Thanks goes to jumba for helping me.

NoScript - There's a browser safer than Firefox... It is Firefox, with NoScript!

The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox: this add-on allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. NoScript's unique whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even not known yet!) with no loss of functionality. Although whitelisting your favourite websites may seem an annoyance at first, this addon really does shine when you accidently stumble upon a 'bad' website.

Adblock Plus - Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them!

Adblock Plus combined with Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper can create magic. It allows user to select HTML content of the page, and so it enhances the advertisement filter scope to virtually full. For example, using element hiding helper one can remove sections from GMail, Orkut, Facebook, etc. showing advertisement content. The extension provides user with simple and advance view modes, with preview facility. And if you find something which you have trouble blocking; a couple of clicks later and you can send a screen and report to the makers who will do there best to fix it.

Redirect Remover mainly has two purposes:

1. Speed up browsing by de-proxyfying images and directly jumping to link-target
2. Increase transparency on some links by showing "real" link-target

It doesn't increase privacy a great deal but where it does shine is stopping redirects. Ever been on a website and you constantly get redirected to another 10 websites? This stops this! If you would like to test your Redirect Remover installation, have a look at the test page with all kinds of links containing redirects, special characters and so on.

GreaseMonkey is a Firefox extension which allows you to modify the way web pages display by utilizing JavaScript code. Thousands of unique scripts tailored to a large number of sites are available free of charge. New scripts are published daily by a very active developer community. Users are also given the ability to write their own scripts.

Basically it is an extra addon service which will probably meet any of your needs to do with browsing. If you want it then there will probably be a script which does that. Hell, there will be a script which you don't know you want yet.

Examples of these scripts are; one which removes download wait time.; another is one which embeds youtube videos into most websites, from 4chan to techsupportalert.

Just remember if you do install you need to find a site to download scripts - I recommend UserScripts.org

Here is an article about the best GreaseMonkey Scripts.

Add-on Collector - A Mozilla-given way to organize your addons.

Its features include capabilities to recommend, share and sync addons; and the simple, 3-page interface provides an effective way to do so. Browse all add-ons collections at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections, set the collections you like as favorite, or create your own.

Beware of some of the Addons recommended (i.e Babylon Toolbar)

Below are simple steps you can follow to install add-ons from your favorites, create your favorites, publish your favorite add-ons to your collection and get notifications when your favorites are updated.

1. Create account at: https://addons.mozilla.org
2. Install Add-on Collector
3. Restart browser to complete the addon installation
4. Go to Tools-->Add-ons-->Select Add-on Collector-->Click Options-->Subscriptions
5. Enter your login details created in step 1
6. Now you will see 'Subscriptions' tab in Tools-->Add-ons
7. This tab will provide list of add-ons from your favorites
8. On selection of your installed add-on in the mail window (Tools-->Add-ons), it will show 'Publish To' button to publish selected add-on to your own collection.
    

Lazarus: Form Recovery - Recover those forms the easy way!

This addon secretly saves everything you write into a form and keeps it secure within it's own 'form history'. A number of things can happen when you're writing on the internet; browser crashes, server timeouts, accidently clicking back — pretty much anything! This let's you simply go back to where you were writing, right click, 'Recover Form' and done! You can paste back exactly what you were writing.

This becomes a real lifesaver if you use webmail, forums, editing content, anything at all! This is a worth-while addon you can simply install, forget and use when needed.

My current problem is that for me atleast, on some webpages it doesn't seem to work. An example of this is techsupportalert or the new beta YahooMail, where the option doesn't appear.

DownloadHelper - Download any media file on basically any page!

The easy way to download and convert Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites.
This works also for audio and picture galleries.

DownloadHelper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites.
Just surf the Web as you are used to, when DownloadHelper detects it can do something for you, the icon gets animated and a menu allows you to download files by simply clicking an item.
For instance, if you go to a YouTube page, you'll be able to download the video directly on your file system. It also works with MySpace, Google videos, DailyMotion, Porkolt, iFilm, DreamHost and others.

Since version 3.1 (it's on 4.9.5, with more features than ever), you can setup the extension to automatically convert the downloaded movies to your preferred video format and then automatically into a certain folder. This however requires you to instal converthelper (a fully safe application) which will do these features, but will place a watermark on converted videos.

In negatives I have heard of people say it slows down firefox.

MyWOT - This is a great litle utility which provides an extra layer of security to your browser with a web based service which rates every single website. With a community of millions you can probably find out whether a website is bad by one click. The problem with anybody being able to rate is that it can be easily manipulated by rivals, friends or employees. So of course this cannot be a 5* addon while you can pay WOT for a 100% excellent rating (yes, bad sites can actually pay them off)

REMEMBER - IF AN ADDON FITS INTO THIS CATEGORY BUT IS IN THE GENERAL/BEST SECTION I WILL NOT REVIEW IT AGAIN.

BetterPrivacy - Ever wondered why you are still tracked though you tried everything to prevent it? With BetterPrivacy you there will no longer be a trace...

The BetterPrivacy Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox:
Better Privacy serves to protect against special longterm cookies, a new generation of 'Super-Cookie', which silently conquered the Internet. This new cookie generation offers unlimited user tracking to industry and market research. Concerning privacy Flash-cookies are most critical.
This add-on was made to make users aware of those hidden, never expiring objects and to offer an easier way to view and to manage them - since browsers are unable to do that for you. Or as with me then you can set it so it silently deletes the 'LSOs'(Super-Cookies) so you are protected without constant messages.

Beef Taco - Sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising for 100+ different advertising networks, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all members of the Network Advertising Initiative, and many other companies.

To be honest, BetterPrivacy and Beef Taco seem similar. They both basically find and remove tracking cookies. The difference is that BetterPrivacy sets out to remove these 'Super-Cookies', Beef Taco is no where near as extensive as that, essentially Beef Taco opts-out of  tracking cookies. The problem is that Beef Taco is no good against websites which force these possibly harmful cookies, meaning in theory it is a good addon, however realistically it has flaws.

BlockSite - You don't like a site? You don't have to see it again.

BlockSite is an extension, which automagically blocks websites of your choice. Additionally, this extension will disable all hyperlinks to these websites, by just displaying the link text without the clicking functionality. There are down sides to this though:

1- If this websites stops doing whatever you don't like about it, you won't know, and to stop the ban you have to go through setting to remove it, only to maybe then have to go through setting again to re-enable it.

2- It still shows up on Google Searches fine.

3- It sometimes blocks websites at random - very annoying

I will tell you if these bugs stop as it was a brilliant addon.

LinkExtend provides meta-site-ratings for computer safety, child safety, company ethics, and popularity. Safety results come from eight online services giving you a safer browsing experience. Site links, titles, files and reviews are also included. If you know of MyWOT or Macafee SiteAdvisor then basically it is all of those rolled up into one addon.

It sounds great but I'm not convinced. For starters I have trouble viewing it on most pages because it's interface is transparent with black text - making it pretty poor to see. (If there is an option to stop this please tell me!) Their customer support is terrible, I messaged them about that two months ago with no reply (I got the auto-reply). Also when you install it then it tries to install Babylon, PriceDong and several other adware products. Edit: I have now heared that it gives you a choice now, however it used to be much worse.

FlashBlock - Never be annoyed by a Flash animation again! Blocks Flash so it won't get in your way, but if you want to see it, just click on...

IIt does what it says on the tin. If you often get annoyed something playing whilst trying to browse the internet, or if you get sick of dailymotion/youtube auto-play then this may be for you.

What happens is the initial flash frame gets replace with a play simple - making every piece of flash optional. And then if you want flash on the site without having to confirm then you can add it to a whitelist which you need not press play everytime.

ShowIP - See who's the site is and where they are.

This is kind of the opposite of Privacy for the owner of the website. ShowIP shows the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows you to gather infomation (right click) and hostname (left click), like whois, netcraft, etc. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard. This gives you a hint as to whether you are on a legit website and that it is safe for buisness (a reliable website probably has nothing to hide in their infomation)

MyWOT - This is a great litle utility which provides an extra layer of security to your browser with a web based service which rates every single website. With a community of millions you can probably find out whether a website is bad by one click. The problem with anybody being able to rate is that it can be easily manipulated by rivals, friends or employees. So of course this cannot be a 5* addon while you can pay WOT for a 100% excellent rating (yes, bad sites can actually pay them off)

REMEMBER - IF AN ADDON FITS INTO THIS CATEGORY BUT IS IN THE GENERAL/BEST SECTION I WILL NOT REVIEW IT AGAIN.

FoxSaver gives you a screen-saver for your Firefox, with really good pictures: view nice non-offensive public pictures in your Firefox screen-saver added at the owner site, set your own picture's folder, get it from public RSS feed, scroll through these nice pictures, or see pictures whenever you want.

Let's say your are tired after a lot of browsing; and got to get a cup of coffee, this screen-saver starts protecting your Firefox screen with nice, attractive, peaceful pictures.

A lite-weight add-on worth to have.

ColorfulTabs - As you might guess, ColorfulTabs turns each of your open browser tabs a different color. It can make it easier to find the tab you want, but mostly it just makes your screen pretty—like a rainbow.

However with Firefox's 'persona' themes these can look a bit foolish. But still worth a go!

Personas Plus - You like personas? Change them often? With this then it lierally takes two clicks.

Personas are firefox's most recent appearance update in that you can change the appearance of it, without having to install a new theme.

PersonasPlus adds a small button to the add-on bar. Meaning you can change the one installed on your firefox anytime, anyplace. Not only this but before you can preview the theme just by hovering over it!

Stylish - Restyle the web with Stylish, a user styles manager. Stylish lets you easily install themes and skins for Google, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, and many, many other sites. You can even customize Firefox and other programs themselves.

This does what it says on the tin - You think a website doesn't look as great as it could; Stylish will easily change that.

Personas Rotator - Personas Rotator is a new companion for Personas Firefox add-on to change over 65000+ skins periodically on Firefox. What Will Your Browser Wear Now?

Personas Rotator will automatically rotate the Personas skins you have. If you logged in GetPersonas.com and have favorites in the system, the add-on will try to rotate your My Favorites personas. If you did not log in the system and have no My Favorites personas the rotation is completely random through different collections

Just remember, if you do get this then you have to download the personas you like in order for it to be rotated. Get from the mozilla website.

Toolbar Buttons - Basically this addon just provides a different visual button set, with which you can change buttons of most of your toolbars to any of the ones given.

REMEMBER - IF AN ADDON FITS INTO THIS CATEGORY BUT IS IN THE GENERAL/BEST SECTION I WILL NOT REVIEW IT AGAIN.

FasterFox Lite Fasterfox Lite: Performance and network tweaks for Firefox, without the Enhanced Prefetching.

Fasterfox Lite comes with pre-configured tweaks to improve the browsing speed of Firefox when using most broadband internet connections. Fasterfox Lite will speed up your web browsing right out of the box with no assembly required.

Personally, I didn't see a huge difference between Firefox with FasterFox or without it. However, it has amazing reviews. So I guess I would recommend it.

If you find it good or bad then please say it in the comments.

Download StatusBar - Personally, I hate unneccesary annoyance. In this case the annoyance is that Firefox doesn't have a built in Download box, it only has a seperate window. Download StatusBar incorporates the feature from Google Chrome (or the other way around...?) in that you can either have a tiny icon or a thin bar to see your downloads and their progress.I find it great to have access to your recent downloads with a small addon at the bottom of your browser.

I love this addon, mainly because it's extremelly useful and I've never found any bugs. Another plus is that it will work on Firefox up to Firefox 9 and presumably onwards, so no more waiting for an update from your favourite addons.

Unshorten.It - This one is a mixture of safety and usefulness - In that have you ever been on an imageboard (4chan) or somewhere that posts shortened links? When you've seen shortened links have you wondered where they take you? You can fnd where their destination is with one click.

Basically if you see a link from tinyurl.com or bit.ly then you right click and press unshorten this link... Anothertab will open and you should have it's destination.

There have been a few problems with this service. One being that I have found occasionally it says that 'They cannot find the destination'. However I will thenmanually type the URL into Unshorten.it and the service will work fine. [Edit: The developers say they have fully fixed that. But if it doesn't work properly try doing it manually]

FastestFox - Save time by speeding up repetitive tasks. Get faster, parallelized downloads, see definitions, auto-load the next page, improve searching, and more.

Unlike FasterFox, which tries to make your browsing experience faster technically (tweaking DNS and link prefetching). FastestFox speeds everything up by improving your searching, or giving you easy access to your favourite sites. Another feature is that as in the picture you can easily compare shops online.

However FastestFox relies on the latest websites and theredatabase. Therefore whenever a website (i.e Youtube, Google) changes thensometimes it stops fuctioning fully whilst it updates. For me this is the main downside which I've found.

Read It Later - Save pages to read later with just one click. When you have time, access your reading list from any computer or phone, even without an internet connection!

Read It Later has many features, from saving pages then viewing them later offline on the go. To saving a page then reading it later on your SmartPhone.

In the past this addon has been quite buggy. At the moment I'm having no trouble with it, but just beware. Another negative is that the devloper's aren't very good, their support is pretty terrible, in that they don't seem to care about your problems.

FoxLingo - Basically if you want to check spellings or even translate this is the app for you!

This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Joab. Registered members can contact the editor with any comments or suggestions they might have by clicking here.

firefox add-ons, firefox extensions, free browser addons, best free addons, open-source, Mozilla Firefox addons