50 Firefox Add-ons you should DEFINITELY use

Though there are thousands of thousands of Firefox add-ons.  Everyone has their own personal favorites.  But I am sure some of them are everyone's favorite.

I am trying to compile a list of best of the best Firefox add-ons and extensions which are useful for specific purpose so that I can quickly install them every time I install Firefox on any new machine.

I will request all the visitors and readers to help me compile this list by suggesting their own favorites and what they find good about it.  I will keep updating this list based on your feedback and after I try it.

Below is the list of 50 of my favorite Firefox Add-ons.  I have categorized the list as per my convenience and based on purpose.  Check it out:

Toolbars

1. Delicious:  Delicious Bookmarks integrates your bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access.
2. Facebook Toolbar:  Integrate your Facebook life into your browser.  Features:
   
   
   
   • Search Facebook from anywhere.
   • Get Notified.
   • Connect with Friends.
   • Share Content right from the toolbar.
3. Google Toolbar:  No need to explain I think.  Still to know more, read here on Google toolbar features page.  And to know more about latest feature in Beta 5, read at GMail blog.
4. StumbleUpon toolbar:  StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more by simply rating the website with a thumb up or down.  This toolbar makes it easy to find the webpage as per your interest.  With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Social Networking Tools

1. LinkedIn Companion for Firefox:  The Firefox Companion brings you immediate access to your LinkedIn network as you browse and read email.  Key features:
   
   
   
   • See LinkedIn profiles for anyone sending you Web email
   • Search your LinkedIn network from any web site
   • Bookmark profiles and searches for easy access
   • Find a job by seeing who in your network can connect you to hiring managers while you browse major on line job websites
2. Me.dium:  Automatically updating list of the most vibrant topics on the web including politics, music, celebrity news, sports, and much more.
   Comes loaded with Facebook Toolbar and Social Search.
3. meebo:  Instant messaging across all major IM networks built right into Firefox.  Get a sidebar with all of your buddies visible while you're browsing. Get visual notifications when your friends IM you. Drag and drop links and images from web pages right onto your friends!  Read a complete review of this meebo add-on on one of my previous posts.
4. Pingfire:  Post to Ping.fm from Firefox. Supports all of Ping's content types. Supports your own custom triggers as well as posting shortcuts (@tt for Twitter and @fb for Facebook, etc). Easily accessible from anywhere on the web. Quoting. Simply select something on a webpage you're reading and click the "Ping" button. The selected text and the current URL will be added to your message.
5. Sharethis:  Sharethis makes it easier to share. Share with your friends and send messages to MySpace, Facebook, AIM and regular email simultaneously and without signing in to any other account.  Post directly to your personal Facebook or MySpace etc.  You might have seen this on lots of blogs and sites.  But if they don't have it, you can use your FF extension.
6. Shareaholic:  Shareaholic allows you to quickly share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a very wide array of social networking & bookmarking sites - such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Google Reader, MySpace, and StumbleUpon and many more without cluttering up your browser.
   You may use one of the above two, Sharethis or Shareaholic.
7. Twitterfox:  The extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their statuses. Also it has a small text input field to update your status.  Really easy to use and quite useful for twitter fans.

Photo and File Management

1. Drag & Drop.io:  This Firefox add-on (“Drag & Drop.io”) enables drag and drop behavior from anywhere on your system (desktop, explorer, finder, etc.) directly into your drop. It also enables new drops to be created on the fly. More information (including screencast) can be found here.
2. Dragdropupload:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.
3. Firefox Universal Uploader:  This extension allows to upload/download files from your favorite websites using a simple interface. Currently this add-on supports Box.net, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook, Webshots, Omnidrive, Smugmug, SmeStorage, Google Docs, Snaphappi, Adobe Share, Slideshare and many more might be coming very soon.  A really useful add-on.  Checkout complete details here...
   
4. FireFTP:  FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.  More features of this add-on are listed here.
5. Fotofox:  Easily select, tag, title and upload pictures from your computer to an online photo service. Works with Flickr, Tabblo, 23hq, SmugMug, Marela, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Pixelpipe, and Zooomr.
6. GSpace:  This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system.
7. Open IT online:  Open IT Online allows you to open your documents and images online without the need of any software to be installed. It supports Google Docs, Google Apps, Zoho, ThinkFree to edit/view documents and Snipshot, Bilder Editieren, Picnik to edit/view images.
8. Picnik:  This extension adds a menu option when you right click on images to make it easy to pull the image into Picnik for editing.
9. Xoopit for Gmail:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.

Blogging & Review tools

1. Clipmarks:  Clipmarks lets you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email.
2. Evernote:  Provides a button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to Evernote. Works on Windows, Mac & Linux. To know more about it, follow here.
3. Finetuna:  Simply right click an image on a website or grab a screenshot of the entire page and send it to Finetuna.com where you can add notes and comments directly on the image.  You may send the image with comments to any email or share a simple URL. The recipient can then add their own comments and send it back.
   Currently, there is no way to save that reviewed image as an image, but they have this feature in their list for future release.  Otherwise this add-on will be a Jingproject killer for bloggers.
4. Fireshot:  FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. This plug-in provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. It's possible to choose whether you want to capture entire web page or take screenshot of only visible part of the web page.  The captures can be uploaded to FREE public screenshot hosting, saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), printed, copied to clipboard, e-mailed or sent to configurable external editor for further processing. (Not available for Linux)
5. Read it Later:  Read It Later allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.  The same thing you see in Google Reader.
   
6. Scribefire:  Scribefire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
7. Webshots:  Webshots is a Firefox extension that allows you to capture screen shots of web pages. This is great for saving a specific page for future reference, sharing a web page with a friend, and more! So far, you can only capture the screen shots and save them.
8. Whos.amung.us:  This small add-on shows how many people are online currently on your site or blog.

Themes & Customization

1. Black Canvas Gmail Signature:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.
2. Colorfultabs:  Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface.
3. Cooliris:  Full-Screen, 3D -- Cooliris transforms your browser into a visually stunning experience for searching, viewing, and sharing online photos and videos. Our "3D Wall" lets you effortlessly search and zoom your way around thousands of images, videos, movies, news feeds, and even online retailers. To share stuff with friends, just drag and drop.  (Not available for Linux)
   
4. Firefox Showcase:  Arranges all open tabs in visual mode by showing them in thumbnails like in IE7.  Allows you to easily see all the tabs open.
5. Fire.fm:  Fire.fm is your direct access to the extensive music library on Last.fm.
6. Foxytunes:  FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.
   Supports WinAmp, iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine, Pandora, foobar2000, Windows Media Player, Xbox Media Center, Musicmatch, Quintessential, J. River, jetAudio, XMPlay, MediaMonkey, Media Player Classic, Sonique, wxMusik, Real Player, XMMS, Noatun, Juk, Amarok, Music Player Daemon, Rhythmbox and many other players.
7. Gmail Ad blocker:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.
8. Google Indic Transliteration:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.
9. Integrated Gmail:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.  And some of the gadgets you can add to Gmail using the labs features.
10. Office 2007 Black Theme:  A theme based on the Office 2007 Black colors.
11. Walnut for Firefox Theme:  Walnut is a complete skin redesign so that all windows, widgets, panels, etc have a wooden look & feel.
12. Wise Stamp Signature:  Read about it on my previous post - 10 Gmail Extensions you should try for sure.

Information Providers

1. Alexa Sparky:  Alexa Sparky is a free Firefox plug-in built by Alexa.  Sparky provides useful information like Website traffic trend, Reach, Rank and other related things about the sites you visit without interrupting your Web browsing.
2. Answers:  Answers instantly delivers the information you are looking for. Just point at any word, hold the Alt key (Ctrl in Linux) and click. Upon letting go, an AnswerTip in the form of a pop-up "information bubble" appears on the screen explaining the term.  Really good for finding definitions of typical words you might encounter during browsing web pages.
3. WOT:  WOT, Web of Trust, warns you about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware or send spam.  WOT's color-coded icons show you ratings for 20 million websites - green to go, yellow for caution and red to stop – helping you avoid the dangerous sites.
4. Yapta:  With Yapta's add-on for Firefox, you can instantly confirm that Yapta has begun tracking prices on the flights you’ve tagged, quickly compare flights you’ve tagged while shopping multiple airline sites and get email alerts when prices drop. Get credits or refunds from the airlines.  Really cool add-on if you are frequent traveler and airline ticket shopper.
5. Fasterfox:  One of my friend at The Technical Thought of You has written a really cool use of this Fasterfox add-on for checking your website/blog speed.  Because this add-on tells you on fly how much time it took to load a website/blog, just look in your bottom FF taskbar.

Advanced

1. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer:  If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you'll want Foxmarks. Install Foxmarks on each computer, and it works silently in the background to keep your bookmarks and (optionally) passwords synchronized.
2. IE tab:  You can easily view webpages in Internet Explorer within Firefox with this add-on.  Really good for the websites that works only in Internet Explorer.
3. IE8 Activities for Firefox:  This extension is an implementation of IE8 Activities for Firefox.  Activities is a new feature in IE8. You can get more information here:  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/NewFeatures.htm#Activities
4. Prism for Firefox:  Converts websites into web application which you can start from your Desktop as application.  Google Chrome got it now, but Prism for Firefox had it long before that.  Simply go to Tools -> Convert website to application.  Next time just double click on that shortcut to open it.  Use it to convert Google Calendar, Flickr and many other websites as application for easy access.
   And hey, you can use Prism to convert Google Reader into a desktop application and read foreign language feeds with its new world wide Translation option.
   
5. Webchunks:  Webchunks is a Firefox3 implementation of Microsoft Webslices (features appeared with IE8). It allows you to "follow" an area of a web page through a dedicated feed bookmarked in a new toolbar.  To learn more about this extension, follow a tutorial for Webchunks at http://disruptive-innovations.com/zoo/webchunks/tutorial.html

These are some of my favorites and frankly speaking all of them are really very helpful for me. And hey, if you use Gmail, then yesterday itself Google has added Voice and Video chat in Gmail.  Once you download this free plug-in, you can start video and voice chatting in Gmail.  Cool huh....!!!

Disclaimer:  The description of the add-ons has been taken from their respective add-on pages.  I have added some comments to it though.  Any error in description or features mentioned but not available is the responsibility of respective add-on providers.  The description provided here is just for information only. I do not take any responsibility for the use of these add-ons.  Some add-ons might not work on all platform.  The exact features can be found on these add-on pages on Mozilla.  (Some images are taken from Mozilla Add-ons pages.)

Technorati tags: Firefox, Add-on, Theme, Extension

Update #1 (11/12/08):  Added Gmail Voice and Video Chat plug-in details.