What is so great about Firefox?

Firefox ? is the browser of choice for many keen Internet users. 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 many people are happy to contribute, and the quality is supremely 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 Ffx is hard to beat.

People use Firefox for many purposes, work or leisure-related. We have therefore grouped the add-ons according to their broad intended purpose. Note that there will also normally be a major beta version of Ffx in parallel existence at any time, so we need to state whether an add-on works with that as well. For example at the time of inception of this article, Firefox 2 is the stable release (the version in general use), and Firefox 3 as the new version is also quite widely used. Firefox add-ons are of two broad classes, Extensions and Themes, and there are also plug-ins.

We've kept them all together and are still working on this page.

Firefox is one of the best browsers available. As a matter of fact it comes with overwhelming features out of the box, and yet, you can make it even better or better adjusted to your needs by adding extensions to it. The extensions in this section we recommend so strongly, that we think, you must have them!

• 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.

• Author: Giorgio Maone
• Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
• Homepage: http://noscript.net/
• Get support: http://noscript.net/forum/

• 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.

• Author: Wladimir Palant
• Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
• Homepage: http://adblockplus.org/
• Get support: http://adblockplus.org/forum/

• Redirect Remover

It 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 really increase your privacy. It can, but there are like a dozen ways to circumvent Redirect Remover, so don't expect it to do wonders. 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:

http://redirectremover.mozdev.org/rdrtestpage.html

• Author: xeen
• Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/537
• Homepage: http://redirectremover.mozdev.org/
• Get support: http://redirectremover.mozdev.org/contact.html

• FoxSaver

Get a screen-saver for your Firefox, with really good pictures

1. View nice non-offensive public pictures in your Firefox screen-saver added at the owner site:
2. Or set your own picture's folder
3. Or get it from public RSS feed
4. Scroll through these nice pictures
5. 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.

• Author: chrislusf, Chiyan
• Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5276
• Homepage: http://www.foxsaver.com/
• Get support: http://blog.foxsaver.com/ (may provide some support)