20 Must-Have Firefox Extensions

Wow, Computerworld (which covers IT for big businesses) is the last place I ever thought would be hip enough to do a story on Firefox extensions. But here it is, and darn if there aren't some great extensions to be found in this piece, including a number I installed myself.

If you aren't familiar with Firefox extensions, they're one of the coolest parts of the browser: Third-party programs that plug in to Firefox and let it do things it couldn't do before. Kind of like a widget, but for your browser.

All 20 on the Computerworld list are worth examining, but here are the ones that I installed specifically after reading the story and which I can fully recommend.

IE Tab - A real life-saver. You know how sometimes you'll open a page in Firefox, and there will be embedded video, and you'll see that little green puzzle piece instead of the video? That's because Firefox can't render WMV movie files without a lot of tweaking (which I don't have the patience for). The solution is usually to open the page in Internet Explorer, which takes a long time and is a real headache. IE Tab solves all this: It puts a little icon in the bottom right corner. Click it, and your rendering engine changes from Firefox to IE, without leaving the browser. That affects only that tab/page until you close it or change it back, making it super easy to use. (It even lets you use Microsoft Update from within Firefox.)

FireFTP - Easy FTP client you can run within Firefox. Great if you frequently upload files to a server, blog site, etc.

Answers - Hold down the Alt key and you can look up the definition of any word on any page from Answers.com.

And one that's not in the Computerworld story:

Adblock Plus - Kills pop-ups, banners, and lots of other ads from lots of places. It doesn't scrub away all of them, but it sure does help to clean up web pages.