The Top Three Absolutely Essential Plugins For Firefox
Over many years of using various browsers to surf the internet – I have realized that there are certain essential things that make my browsing experience pleasant and productive. Various plugins built in Firefox help achieve this functionality. Here is an outline of the first plugins you should be installing on a fresh Firefox install. Please remember that this is from a active browsing perspective – and not about how to prevent certain things from happening.(For example – having a plugin to block ads etc)
Gmarks firefox plugin
The first important ingredient of a good browsing session is continuity! Yes – you have to have some continuity with your previous experiences. Otherwise each browsing session becomes independent of each other and hence non-productive compared to what you could have achieved if you remembered what you were looking at last! But that is what bookmarks are for, right? Yes of course – you have the bookmarks, but what if you are using two computers? Or even worse – you have arrived at a university and sitting at your new computer you wonder how to lug your bookmarks into this machine! The plugin to do all this and more is Gmarks. It helps you use the Google bookmarking service to have a central online repository of all your bookmarks! The Gmarks plugin taps into this resource and presents an alternative bookmarking menu at top in Firefox. The advantage of using Gmarks is that all you have to do on a new computer is load Gmarks and login to your Google account. That is it! All your bookmarks are back! Better than syncing or trying other kinds of roundabout means to get your bookmarks back. Also each new bookmark that you add under Gmarks will be stored forever online! No chance of losing them again!
Tree-Style Tabs Firefox Plugin
The second most important ingredient of a good browsing experience is – organisation. If your tabs are all over the place you will be spending more time hovering your mouse at the top, trying to figure out your own trains of thought! Not only will you be confused, but you will also be unable to do multi-tasking. To your rescue is TreeStyle Tabs plugin for Firefox. This plugin does two simple things – takes your tabs to the left of your main browsing section (especially handy in widescreen monitors) and organizes them in the hierarchy that they were opened. This means that if you click on “open in a new tab” after right-clicking on a link, the new tab appears indented further than the parent tab and directly under it. This sets up a system more like your files and directories. You know which tab opened up which new tab. Also if you are doing two or three tasks in parallel, this makes it possible to visually isolate the different tasks.
Session Manager Firefox Extension
The third most important aspect of a good browsing experience is sessions. You arrive at a point where all the information is in front of you. And yet you do not have enough time to go through all of it just then. Instead of going on a bookmarking marathon – save the session – use the Session Manager plugin for Firefox. Session Manager stores all the tabs open – in a file, called a session file. Later you can reload the session file to get back all your tabs. In an instant you can have all the information that you researched yesterday!
This session functionality can be extended in conjunction with the Gmarks plugin and some free hosting. For example I store my saved sessions in a free online storage account (ex. Idrive, Mozy etc) and bookmark the link in my Gmarks. So all I have to do is load the two plugins – go to the sessions download page from Gmarks and get back all my sessions anytime – anywhere!
So there you have it – the three most important plugins to augment your browsing experience. The Chrome Browser (from Google) which has just entered the market has managed to get sessions and Gmarks – thanks to plugins developed by enthusiasts. It is yet to get the tree style functionality for its tabs. Till that happens Firefox is still on top! Opera loses out in not having a Gmark setup as yet. In a later article we will explore the usefulness of the next five most important plugins.
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