Firefox is a good browser. It does take a bit of getting used to if you have always used Internet Explorer. Then again, much the same can be said vs. Word and WordPerfect and Open Office.
What "they" say is almost true: "use Firefox for a month and you won't want to use IE anymore". I say almost because I still prefer Favorites over Bookmarks. Maybe what I need is a tool to sync Firefox bookmarks back to my Start/Favorites. Automagically, of course, would be a nice option.
Out of the box, Firefox is little more than a basic web browser. That's good. Basic in this case equals stable. Why have all the bells and whistles you don't need? If a bell or whistle you like is missing, just install an extension.
I have read a few lists and tried a ton of extensions. Some seem pointless. Some seem silly... like "Cards 0.16.1 offers 27 different solitaire games". Why would I ever play Solitare in my web browser? Because I can? No, thanks. Some are useful. This page is about my "useful list".
In no particular order, here are descriptions and links to some of the extensions I have tried over the last few months. I tend to be cranky about things that crash my system to the point of 2 strikes and you're out. All files are linked from this page and everything is here.
I'll update this page as I try new stuff.
Compact Menu 1.7.2 "duplicates the menubar on the toolbar as a menu of menus". You can think of it as the Firefox 'Start' button. But it says 'Menu'. How often do you really use the "File Edit View Go Tools Help" in any program? This saves a lot of space. On my FireFox I dragged the Stop, Home, Back, etc., buttons from the Navigation Toolbar to the very top menubar where it normally says File Edit View Help etc. I also have the Address field there. Walla! Everything I need other than a few links on ONE toolbar. It's great but the Address field was pretty small. 'Stop-or-Reload' helped a bit. Compact Menu makes a lot more space.... which the Address field now fills. :)
Stop-or-Reload Button "Turns the stop and reload buttons into one. When you can Stop, you have a stop button, otherwise it's a Reload button."
BugMeNot 0.6.1 "Bypass compulsory web registration with the context menu". Hit a site that wants you to register but you don't? Right-click and select BugMeNot.
ieview 0.84 "Open pages in IE via the r-click menu". Handy for sites that require IE (well, actually, most of those I have ever found are warez or smut sites trying to hijack your home page and install a dialer). But for sites /you trust/ this is quicker than copying the URL, opening IE, and pasting the URL. I've used it a few times, mostly just to try it. There is also a counterpart that hooks into IE so you can open pages in Firefox.
Image Zoom adds zoom functionality for images. Wow! This blows IE's zoom-in and zoom-out out of the water. Nice! This seems to work as well as zooming up and down in PaintShopPro. Get this one.
Print It! adds a print and print preview option to the right-click menu. Handy and works quite nicely.
TextMarker is similar to IE's Highlight (one of the Powertoys). A nice touch is that you can remove highlights without reloading the page. Hey, an erasable highlighter!
Titlebar Tweaks lets you to switch the order of the browser name and page title in the browser's titlebar, or remove one of the two entries. It allows you to change the browser name in the titlebar. I have just the page title displayed. Hello? ... I happen to know the browser's name. (If you change the browser's name to a space, you can have a blank title bar.) There is a Registry edit to do the same in Internet Explorer, I'm sure there is a way to edit "whatever" in Firefox to get the same effect. Meawhile, this extension works.
Plain Text Links treats selected plain text urls as links. Just select the text and right-click to open in a new tab or new window. Possibly of more use in Thunderbird mail, but it seems to cause no problems. Pretty neat anyway.
Favicon Picker adds a click and point UI for replacing bookmark icons. 'Eye candy' is another term. :) And... you can install it, change a few icons, and then disable it (so it's not loading) but your changed icons stay changed. Now, why would you want to change a link icon? How about a link for Google on the link bar that is just the Google G?
Context Search "transforms the "Web Search for..." context item into a menu containing your Mycroft search plugins. This is very convenient, since it allows you to decide which search engine you use. Firefox's default is to use the currently selected search plugin only." I don't know what or who Mycroft is or what they are talking about. But this is a nice extension. I can highlight a word (or words), right-click and have the option to seach on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Creative Commons, Dictionary.com, and eBay. Pretty slick.
OutSideBar expands sidebars outwards to the left of the browser window. Ok, not much use if you run in full screen. But if you have, say, a 21 inch monitor, reading most sites gets to be a bit of work with the browser at 1280x1024. I run with my browser window sized about 800 x 700. With this extension, when you open the Bookmarks sidebar, you still have your usual window to use. Uh, just try it.
miniT lets you drag tabs to re-order them. Handy if you have several tabs at the same time. I haven't used this a lot.
User Agent Switcher adds a menu option and toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. That is, you can make Firefox lie to web servers. Why? Ever visit a site that says "this page requires IE4" (for example) and if you don't have the "required" browser, you may as well go to H E double-hockey sticks? This is to fix that annoyance. But don't expect the page to operate perfectly either.
PDF Download checks if the target is a pdf file and lets you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside a new tab, download it to the filesystem or view it as HTML). I know I hate it when what I think is a link to the next page turns out to be a link to a PDF.
Show Image adds an option to the right-click menu to reload images that failed to show on the page. I've used this a couple of times. Mostly though, I just hit f5 and reload the page.
AniDisable stops animated gifs from playing when the page loads. Or you can have it allow the gif to play once or twice. Or right-click an animated gif and stop it. Me? It's just as easy to hit the ol' escape key to stop the action. (No, I can't hit the Stop button on the toolbar because it's a Reload button if the page is done loading.) I've un-installed this simply for lack of use.
DragToTab lets you drag links, text, or files on to the New Tab and New Windows buttons to open the respective browser window. Nice. Not much use to me and my habits.
ChromeEdit is a simple User Profile editor. Edits userChrome.css, userContent.css or user.js, without the hassle of finding your profile. Not that I need to play with that stuff very often. It's disabled most of the time.
Web Developer is handy if you like to make web pages. Too much to describe, just try it.
deskcut "adds desktop shortcut creation to the context menu". Same effect as IE's ability to r-click and drag a link to the Desktop. I use this a lot.
One more... not an extension but a bookmark of sorts. Right click on the Bookmarks toolbar and select New Bookmark. Give it a name, in this case call it 800x726. Enter in the location field: javascript:void(top.resizeTo(800,726)); What does this do? Just click it and Firefox's window is resized. What's the point? I have a homemade home page and this size window is just before the background starts to tile and goes off center. As I go through the day and drag Firefox around it gets resized, this resets it it a single click. How do I know what size I need? WebDeveloper told me.