It seems to be a widely known face that the real strength behind Mozilla’s Firefox browser is in the wide range of extensions available. Whilst Opera might have more core functionality, Firefox has the potential to be the superior browser, especially now the memory issue is fixed.

But if I could only choose four Firefox extensions, what would I choose? Here are my choices in the usual reverse order:

4. DownThemAll

I find this extension so useful when on a fast line. My internet connection seems to be around the 12Mb area (I don’t know the actual speed, as I get the thing for free) and when your downloading you often find that you get nowhere near your connections actual speed. Using any download manager will do the trick and bring those speeds back into line, but why bother with an external manager when you can have one specially built for your favorite browser?

3. Adblock Plus

Whilst Adblock seems to still be the more popular extension, Adblock Plus is by far the superior option for removing adverts from your internet experience. Whilst Adblock requires manual blocking of advertisements, Adblock Plus uses a set of continually updated set of filters to do the blocking automatically. In addition, the extension can — not by default — attempt to regain the space that would have been taken up by the advertisement.

2. Nightly Tester Tools

Now although this extension is designed to help testers when using the nightly ‘Minefield’ releases of Firefox, this tool has one major feature that all users of Firefox would find useful — force Firefox to believe an extension is compatible with the current version and enable it. Now why would you want to do this? Well unlike Internet Explorer, which seems to get large updates every now and again; Firefox is updated with bug and security fixes pretty regularly. When this happens all of your extensions will be disabled, as they are signed as being compatible up to the last version released; although many extensions are updated within hours of this occurring, many extensions are not. In addition, users may still be able to use extensions that were abandoned by their creator. Please be careful whilst using this extension, as it could cause problems with your browser.

1. NoScript

Everyone hates pop-ups and there are even worse things than pop-ups on the web these days. Thankfully Firefox’s built in pop-up blocker does a good job in removing pop-ups, so do Internet Explorer and Opera, but browsers with blockers just happened to be a double-edged sword. Since a large portion of their pop-ups were annoying anyone anymore, whoever it is that likes to make the damn things decided to work out how to get round all these blockers. Instead the internet (which is serious business by the way) is infested with Javascript based advertisements. These damn things can either block 99.9999% of the bloody screen, follow your scrolling of the page, follow your mouse (by now you start to wonder why they haven’t got the message,) jump out of no-where when you click a link, and steal your first wallet. Ok they might not steal your wallet, but they frustrate me more than pop-ups ever did.

So you could just turn off Javascript, for sure that would kill the little fuckers, but you wouldn’t be able to surf half the web either. So that’s where NoScript comes in and saves the day. NoScript turns off Javascript for every site and lets you whitelist the sites that you do want to allow to use Javascript. Thus you no longer have to view the annoying advertisements, plus you can still do your internet banking. Between NoScript and Adblock Plus you can truely reclaim the web.

What would your choices be?