I had to completely uninstall and reinstall my Firefox browser the other day due to some javascript and xml errors that prevented me from accessing any of my addons.  This was caused when I updated to the latest version of Firefox.

Well since I had to rebuild a fresh Firefox and download all of my addons and extensions all over from scratch I thought it would be a good idea to share with my readers the primary Firefox addons that I use and tell you about them and what I use them for.

Here is snapshot of my addons, courtesy of the All-in-One Sidebar plugin.

• All-in-One Sidebar

This plugin creates a bar to the left of the Firefox browser which gives one click access to bookmarks, history, downloads, addons, web page source code and several other things. This plugin prevents the need from using the drop down menu’s at the top of the screen 80% of the time for me.

• DashBlog

This addon allows you to cut/paste clips from any website and save them directly to your desktop, this prevents you from having to do a print screen and then cut/paste just what you want in a paint program, and skips a step making it easier to clip sections or logo’s from web sites and add them to your blog. You can also grab video’s and mp3’s from a web site, but I use it strictly for the cut/pasting of snippets from a site.

• Download Statusbar

This addon allows you to see the status of your downloads at the bottom of your Firefox window, it shows a progress bar so you can easily see when your downloads completed and you can click on them and install them, or remove them from the browser from there.

• DownloadHelper

This is Video Download Helper and is quite useful for downloading flash video from various websites including Google Video and YouTube.  When you want to download a video to your computer, this is one of two major plugins that I use.

• Fast Video Download

This is the 2nd addon that I use to download youtube video’s to my desktop, it is faster and allows for 1 click downloads, but sometimes flakes out or doesn’t download and I fail back to DownloadHelper if that happens.  It is faster though and works most of the time.

• Firebug

Hands down if you maintain any type of website or blog Firebug is essential it lays out all of the code and categorizes it, lets you browser through the CSS, Javascript, HTML and actually make changes on the fly to the code and lets it render so you can see the results in real time on what the site would look like with the modified code.  This is an essential tool for anyone who needs to debug websites, especially stuff in hard to find CSS area’s, and when blogs have so many CSS files and PHP files, this is a great addon for finding that hidden stuff.

• FireFTP

This is the standard if you do file transfers between your PC and any web servers, I use this to upload files and images to my blog sites, it is very easy to use and has a norton commander style interface so it is very easy to just drag and drop files from your source to your destination.  Great FTP client that opens as a new tab inside of FireFox.  (I wish it supported SCP and SFTP, it would replace WinSCP if it did).

• Fission

This was a new one for me, but I liked it so much when I got it I had to add it.  This makes the progress bar show right in the URL bar when you hit a site.  It took some getting used to, but now you see the progress meter behind the actual typed URL at the top.  This makes it just like Safari browser progress bar.

• PDF Download

PDF files when opened in any browser consume lots of memory and tend to have flaky problems for me with Firefox, this allows me to easily just one click download PDF files so I can open them with FoxIT  Reader which is better and much much faster than Acrobat Reader.

• StumbleUpon

Every blogger should stumble once and a while, I just recently got into Stumbling, and use this as my tool to move around and find random stumbled posts.  I use it to sometimes upload posts as well.

• Torrent Finder Toolbar

Nobody should pirate anything, piracy is illegal.  However if you are in the torrent scene and need to find stuff, there is no better addon for firefox.  Torrent Finder Toolbar will search through all the major torrent sites to find what you are looking for and saves enormous amounts of time.  Useful for finding freeware, shareware, or any other types of files.  I should warn you, 75% of everything you find on torrent is infected with trojans and malware be warned, if you are looking for freeware or software, get it from opensource or company websites instead of Torrent, much of the freeware is contaminated.

• United States English Dictionary

This adds a much more accurate and helpful spell checker to Firefox, so when you right click on words in your blog posts, it will auto correct them.  Not much else to say about it.

• Summary

So that is my primary golden list of addons and extensions for Mozilla Firefox, and I have used dozens of them over the years.  I am more than happy to hear what extensions and addons my readers use, so if you have any to recommend please let me know.  I know about Alexa Toolbar…etc but I had so many toolbars it was slowing my Firefox down tremendously.

-Dragon Blogger

If you enjoyed this post consider subscribing via or EMAIL