Digital Cheat Sheet

In the last year or so the market for web browsers has exploded. More work and advertising are being put into them and adoption rates are starting to pick up for new web browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, and Apple's Safari are starting to become the most important applications on a computer (Yes, I'm deliberately ignoring Opera). With more of our computer taking place in the cloud on websites like Gmail, Yahoo mail, Flickr, Facebook, Hulu, and Twitter having a competent, fast web browser is essential. Google has made inroads this year with their Google Chrome browser and Apple's Safari remains a favorite among Mac users, but it appears that Mozilla's Firefox has been slipping in the previous versions. While adoption is up over Internet Explorer, in terms of speed and mindshare Firefox has been falling behind.

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This weekend to celebrate Independence Day I’m going to discuss my five favorite Firefox add-on. You are probably wondering what the heck Firefox has to do with independence. Firefox is independence from your operating system’s built-in browser (Except if you’re using Linux then just skip the speech and move down to the list). If you use a Mac that is Safari 4 and if you wield a PC then you are packing Internet Explorer 8. While there is nothing wrong with using your operating system’s standard browser, sometimes you want a little more power out of your browser. Well, with Firefox you can answer most problems with a simple add-on and the latest 3.5 update most everything you do will be lightening fast now.

1. Ad Block Plus: It blocks those annoying ads and actually works on most websites. Not much to say here because it is one of those simple add-ons that just works in the background making your experience better.

2. 1Password: This one is Mac-only, but if you own 1Password you can click this button and get 1Password to fill in any password or form data you have stored. Not free, but well worth the money. If you have RoboForm on your PC you can get a similar add-on I believe.

3. SmarterFox: This add-ons adds a ton of little features to Firefox. It enhances the address bar with Wikipedia searches, adds a quick launch keyboard shortcut to Firefox to launch favorite websites, allows you to search various website after you highlight some text in the browser, and much more. This add-on does not do much to speed up your experience, but if you are doing research it is pretty handy.

4. Delicious: The Delicious bookmark bar is pretty nice little add-on. It does give you a toolbar, but I personally do not use it, but rather appreciate the ability to easily bookmark things on Delicious with a single click. After you install the add-on if you click the star on the address bar you will be given the option to also bookmark the website on Delicious, which makes it awesome in my opinion.

5. Download Statusbar: This add-on only really does one thing and that is put a download’s status, as the name implies, in your status bar. This is handy use for an otherwise useless bar across the bottom of my screen. I like it because it also shows you how fast something is coming down.