Firefox

Here are my favourite extensions, in alphabetical order, for Firefox which I recommend to anyone who, like me, is learning Japanese, or building Web sites, or to anyone just browsing the Web everyday!

ColorZilla

Adds a colour-picker button to the status bar of Firefox. With that, you can get the colour of any pixel on any Web page. You can also copy the colour code in different formats into the clipboard.

Firebug

The perfect helper for any Web developer. Check any errors in your pages codes and scripts. Browse through your DOM and modify any HTML tag or CSS rule on the fly. Run bits of JavaScript from the console. This extension is a great replacement to the DOM Inspector, and complements well the Web Developer Toolbar mentioned below.

The Google Toolbar not only allows you to search quickly with the famous search engine, but also has tons of buttons you can choose from to access their other services, including Gmail. You can also share bookmarks across any browsers with the extension installed. If you don’t have Firefox installed, Google offers a version of Firefox bundled with the toolbar. If you already have Firefox, you can follow the same above and just download the toolbar.

Greasemonkey

This enables you to download scripts from a wide collection of them, which can modify the behaviour of one or all the Web sites to your liking. For example, removing advertisement in Hotmail, or saves videos from YouTube and Google Video to your hard disk.

MeasureIt

Gives you a ruler you can use to measure the width and height of anything on a Web page. Useful for visual designers who wants their layout to be pixel-perfect!

Moji

Adds a Japanese-English dictionary sidebar to the browser and options in the context menu to lookup the selected word or kanji with it. Sadly, like PeraPera-kun, mentioned below, there’s no English-Japanese functionality.

PeraPera-kun

A modified version of the RikaiChan add-on with more features, it will pop-up the definition of every Japanese word your mouse hovers. A bit like the Web site PopJisyo, which you can use with any browser. Requires the RikaiChan dictionaries. (I got the name of this extension confused with the ParaPara dance.)

Web Developer Toolbar

Gives you a toolbars with a set of features to help Web developer diagnose Web sites. Including a list of files loaded, disabling CSS, outlining certain elements, display link information, or show passwords, for example. Once installed, don’t forget to click View / Toolbars / Web Developer Toolbars in the menu to see it.

XHTML Ruby Support

Some Japanese Web pages include furigana readings for the words written with kanji. The display is accomplished with special ruby tags in HTML. They’ve usually appear inline in Firefox, but they’ll be displayed correctly on top of the words in Internet Explorer. This extension is to add support for ruby tags in Firefox.

XPather

Adds an XPath field to the DOM Inspector where a path is generated for you when you click on any items in the DOM element list. You can also insert your own expression and see what it will return.

This is what I’m trying right now, Flock (www.flock.com). A browser casually said to be “Web 2.0 friendly”.

I don’t get it. It’s just Firefox with different themes and more extensions, and a new “topbar” that supports Flickr. The Back and Forward buttons no longer have drop-down menus! What is the author thinking? Netscape 3 retro style?

Oooh! I’m amazed! (Note the sarcasm.)

Blogged with Flock, with many manual edits by Rémi.

Give it a smaller stomach! That way it wouldn’t be eating that much memory all the time.

At work, I’ve stoped using Firefox for the simple reason that it’s often taking up to 50% of the entire RAM of my workstation.

I know my workstation only has 256MB of memory, and that Internet Explorer is, I think, somewhat preloaded with the entire system when starting up Windows, but if you look at Opera (what I’m using at the moment), it’s not using even half of what Firefox is taking up.

But at least Firefox supports NTLM, which Opera lacks of.

With all the ideas floating around for the next Google Summer of Code, I’d love it if they’d stop thinking too much about new features simply to be one step ahead of Internet Explorer, and they’d finally take action at making the whole browser a bit better in performance.