While we can’t keep up with all the extensions out there, and everyone will have their own tastes, needs, and style of usage we hope this page is of use to people who are just discovering this “BOL Approved” Browser… or want to get a little more out of an application they are already familiar with. We’ve broken the extensions into relevant categories to make things a bit simpler.

Updated with some new additions to the field and replacements for outdated extensions.

Web Development

Web Developer adds in a toolbar with drop down menus enabling you to disable, alter, resize, clear, outline elements, test validity etc. You can right click on the general toolbar area to hide it from view if you’re not doing dev work at the time to clear things up. You’ll still be able to use some very useful shortcut combos.

Firebug is becoming the defacto debugger for the platform.

XML Developer Toolbar aims to do for XML what the Web Developer toolbar does for XHTML/CSS.

ColorZilla allows you to run an eyedropper over a page and find the hexadecimal code of colors on it – even more useful is an included simple colorwheel you can use to preview similar colors. It can save you from opening a separate application when you’re tweaking a color scheme.

MeasureIt an easy to use tool that lets you drag transparent boxes to find out the height or width of any element or section of a web-page. Good for double-checking CSS or table nesting…

Copy Plain Text: simple and sweet, after selecting and right clicking on text there is a context-menu item to “Copy as Plain Text”. No more longer will you have to copy to notepad and then your editor of choice to get rid of unwanted markup! You can also choose to have this override the default ctrl-c copy functionality.

Browsing

All-in-One Gestures: Even just scratching the surface of this one will change your browsing experience. Mouse gestures are extremely useful: hold down the right click button and draw a command up-down is refresh, up new tab, left back in history, right forward etc. It is extremely simple and the simpler ones are very intuitive (and you have the ability to program your own)... the downside is you’ll make a quick gestures unconsciously while using other people’s browsers. Mouse gestures is a lighter weight alternative (hat is apparently being more actively developed).

IE View: This great extension allows you to easily work around pages, that for whatever reason, don’t display or function properly in Firefox. It adds an option at the bottom of the context menu (which you can bring up by right/alternate clicking on a page) which will automatically load the URL you are at in a new IE window. To deal with those certain misbehaving pages / applications you feel you will often accidentally browse to using Firefox, it also adds an “always view this page in IE” to your tool menu. Windows only.

Tab Mix Plus allows for a great deal of customization regarding tab behaviour, including how to deal with links that want to open in new windows, focus, behavior from different types of links, etc. One simple change (pre 2.0) is the addition of Safari style individual close icons on each tab. It also includes a lightweight session manager.

Session Manager not only saves what tabs were open, but also captures content typed in text feilds, changes to dynamic pages, etc.

Document Map opens up a sidebar that creates an auto TOC based on header tags. It can be useful when browsing through well-coded (x)html/css articles though I doubt it’d be for everyone or every situation. Works well on Wikis and content generated by CMS software.

Security and Privacy

Adblock one of the old selling points of the browser, Adblock allows you to permanently blacklist images from certain domains (it’s amazing how much banner ads decrease after a few *.adserver.com’s etc). You can also prompt to (or automatically) disable flash, etc. Right clicking over graphics provides a context-menu item to block graphics from that base url.

CustomizeGoogle lets you tweak the display behavior of google by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam)... It may definitely appeal to some.

Permit Cookies this extension requires a bit of micro-managing but for the privacy paranoid it’s ideal. You can disable all cookies by default then use a shortcut combo to pull up a simple drop down that will grab the base of the URL you’re currently at and allow it to temporarily or permanently allow cookies. At times this gets annoying – i.e. you may need to add in multiple sites to get things to work (do MSN Spaces require passport.net, passport.com, and/or msn.net). Not for everyone.

NoScript lets you manually set whether sites can use javascript or not. With the amount of sites that have minor but convenient functionality or display options dependent upon javascript having to set rights for sites after links stop functioning gets tedious. For those extremely security conscious or who detest sites that try and pop open new tabs/windows or resize the same it may be worth it.

Research

Scrapbook adds in a great sidebar interface for taking “snapshots” (offline files) of either pages or selections of pages. It is very customizable with hotkeys, context-menu items, etc. You can use it to archive different builds of a site, save a page (dynamic or otherwise) for offline viewing, keep a copy of an article with highlighting etc preserved on it.

PDF Download allows you to customize how pdf files are handled. It does get annoying if you forget to right click and save-as and one opens a new browser window (requiring the entire engine to load) when you wanted to save some documentation (or journal articles from JSTOR).

Miscellaneous

Foxmarks makes switching between (virtual) machines painless bookmark wise for those that don’t want to use a solution such as del.icio.us. Now if only they could snych extensions…

Gmail Notifier: this extension adds a small icon in the lower right corner of the browser with the number of unread messages in your gmail account. You can set it auto-login on load or manually need passwords entered. While it is more subtle than a systray based solution it may be adequate for those that always have a browser open!

BBCodeXtra: Adds easy to use context menus for using BBCode (forum syntax) while in a forum post field.