Beyond the superior rendering capabilities and improved security that Firefox provides, another reason I love using it lies in the power that Extensions provide to the user. Since historically speaking, Firefox was meant as a lightweight browser, it allows extensibility through various add-ons that the user may find useful. Here’s my power-user, supercharged version of FF¹.

As you may be able to tell, I’ve tried to dedicate as much space as possible to viewing websites and less to the things I don’t use [like navigation buttons.] Here’s what I have [click the pic above for the full-size rendition] and how I browse:

Extensions

• del.icio.us Complete - I tag things occasionally. While generally that’s done through a key combo, I keep the button around to quickly jump to my homepage when needed.
• AdBlock - I don’t like pop-ups and ads. I know a lot of websites make their money from ads - so as to not ask for donations - but when I want to help out, I can quickly de-activate blocking for that page [that's why the button's in the toolbar.] It’s also a security enhancement since tampered ads aren’t displayed so they can’t mess with my machine. To note, however, that I keep a pretty large hosts file to do ‘peer-blocking.’ AND some sites - especially embedded flash video - require tweaking of the filter parameters that Filterset.G comes with.
• Google Browser Sync - I have more than one machine and, as such, would like to migrate some of my information across [cookies, bookmarks etc.] To note, there are other services that provide this functionality, so if you feel that Google’s got enough of your information already, you might want to look for an alternative.
• Google Notebook - I think the name’s pretty explanatory as to what this extension does. Lets you clip notes straight to your online Google notebook for later use. Makes a good clipboard between machines if you can’t use something like Synergy.
• Firebug - granted I’m not a real web developer, but Firebug helps out whenever I’m tweaking some page for someone and I’m not sure where the errors is. Also useful to learn things from other people’s code, as it will let you see what code’s behind a certain region of the page.
• Download Statusbar - I don’t like intrusive windows telling me what’s downloading etc. This extension lets you quickly see how many downloads are going on - click it and it will show you a list of the latest grabs and you can launch them, copy the URL etc.
• Tab Mix Plus - this works behind the scenes to bring some massive game to the whole ‘tabbed browser’ scene. Closed tab lists, session recovery and a whole bunch of other important features.
• Download Sort - to get my torrents in their monitored folder, my music in a review folder and other things in their appropriate places. I wish it kicked in automatically, unfortunately you have to right click on an item and select ’save as’ to get it to do its magic.

You might have noticed I don’t use any RSS reader or a GMail notifier. That’s because I have separate apps to do that - I used to have both, though, and yes, I would recommend getting them if you’d like to keep as much in your browser as possible.

Power Surfing

I don’t have any navigation buttons, as you can see. Nor do I have the search bar. I believe key combinations are the way to the fastest experience [granted, I don't ignore the mouse for scrolling/clicking] So, to jump to the address bar, Cmd + L². Cmd + LeftArrowKey goes back in time, Cmd + RightArrowKey goes forward. Cmd + B for bookmarks and Shift + Cmd + H for history. Cmd + [number] will take you to that tab.

Keymarks

By far one of the most useful features for sites I visit often are keymarks. Keymarks let you use a shortcut for a predefined string in your address. For example, for Google I have³

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t& \
rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

How does this work? To create a keymark for Google⁴, you would have it search for a word [say, hackd] and then bookmark the resulting page. Then, open your bookmarks, right click on the new mark and edit it, changing the word you looked for to a %s [in bold type above.] Also give it a short keyword [g] - this is what you will use in the address bar. So, if you want to run a Google search now, just pop to your address bar and type in

g hackd

and it will do it for you. To note, you can use keymarks wherever you may be inputting text you want filled in automatically. Say, for this site, if you wanted to jump straight to only posts under a certain tag, you could have

http://hackd.net/tag/%s

and you would then only have to type hackd technology to see those entries. So it doesn’t need to be only for search engines or sites that may have a search function.

1. Bon Echo used to be the codename for Firefox 2. Since the main Mozilla team has been slow to use Mac OS X’s native buttons and look and feel, somebody very nice made a minor ‘port’ of sorts - but due to obvious copyright issues the name and logo were changed. Regardless, whatever you do in Bon Echo is automatically synchronized with vanilla Firefox - this means history, bookmarks, plugins etc [↩]
2. Linux and Windows users, any Cmd should be a Ctrl on your platform [↩]
3. Wrapped at the \ [↩]
4. You can have a shorter link than the one provided above, but seeing how Google pays the Mozilla Foundation every time somebody uses the search box, I have decided to use same to maybe kick a few bucks their way, too - since I was talking about support [↩]