"Put down that wrench!"

Mainly for my own records, but I'd be interested to see what other Firefox users consider to be their must-have extensions.

Adblock Plus

Ad killer - must-have.

All-in-One Sidebar

Opera-style sidebar control for access to sidebar panels.

Firebug

Excellent set of Web debugging utilities, integrating a javascript console, markup validation, document inspection and others.

Fission

Safari-style progress bar in address bar.

Greasemonkey

Manager and environment for client-side scripts. Usefl for fixing web annoyances or shoehorning extra functionality into third-party websites.

Live HTTP Headers

View HTTP headers of a page while loading. Essential for debugging protocol-level problems.

Scrapbook

Utility for saving webpages in the browser. Useful for saving flight confirmation pages and the like.

Stop-or-Reload Button

Combined Safari-style stop and reload buttons.

View Cookies

Add cookie pane to page info window.

View Source Chart

Renders document structure in a nested hierarchical view.

This is mostly for my own reference, but I thought it worth posting in case anyone else finds it useful. Now that Firefox 2.0 is out, I've noticed a number of changes in the default UI and behaviour from 1.5 that one can no longer change through the options dialogue, and which I find awkward. This is a list of the hidden preferences (visible through about:config) and their settings.

Opening a group of bookmarks in tabs overwrites existing tabs

browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace should be set to false (open bookmark groups in new tabs)

Close buttons on each tab make it harder to close several tabs, and more likely that you'll close a tab accidentally when selecting it

browser.tabs.closeButtons should be set to 3 (single close button at the right end of the tab bar)

Firefox accepts all cookies, regardless of originating server

network.cookie.cookieBehavior should be set to 1 (only accept cookies from the originating server)

Go button on url bar takes up extra screen real estate

browser.urlbar.hideGoButton should be set to true (hides the Go button)

Keywords in the url bar go to Google I Feel Lucky or Google Browse by Name, rather than a basic Google search

keyword.URL should be set to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q= (default for non-Firefox Mozilla products)

sbisson got to this before I did - the first public beta of the Flock browser has now been released. It's a Firefox variant that integrates del.icio.us social bookmarks and blogging more tightly into the browser, but I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed by it. It is slick, even for a beta, but much of the functionality has already been present in the form of Firefox extensions:

• The Shelf is equivalent to the Scrapbook extension
• There are at least two extensions which integrate del.icio.us into Firefox's bookmarks
• There are already blogging extensions, albeit not one which is properly cross-service (WordPress vs MT vs LJ)

I'm a little worried that this is opening the gates to a series of forks of the Firefox development; I'd have been happier if Flock were presented as a family of tightly integrated extensions (in a similar vein to the All-In-One extension, perhaps). As it is, I have no guarantee that developments on the main Firefox trunk will make it into Flock with any timeliness (if ever). For cosmetic enhancements this may not be an issue, but for security fixes this could be critical. There are also no guarantees of support in Flock for major new areas of functionality such as SVG or Canvas, even if those get into Firefox.

Fortunately, the Flock developers are concerned that existing Firefox extensions should work with Flock, which is some consolation.

(this post would have been brought to you by Flock, had the damned thing been able to post to LiveJournal)