Useful Firefox extensions
There are many useful Firefox extensions that suit people's various need. In this article, we recommend a few ones.
Noscript
Noscript selectively enables/disables Javascripts and other dynamic elements like Flash and etc.
Many sites use Javascripts to enhance the interactivity, and many of them also use third-party Javascripts to track your online behavior. For example, a lot of sites use Google analytics and this has raised a lot of privacy concerns. For example, you may browse two independent sites that have Google analytics enabled, however, the Javascripts from Google analytics may know that you are in fact the same user. In this case, you have provided much more information than you want.
With the NoScript extension for Firefox, you can selectively enable/disable Javascripts and other dynamic elements from the sites you visit. This helps protect your privacy. In addition, by blocking annoying ads and other unneeded elements Noscript gives a more pleasant and faster online experience.
In addition to this, it also provides some kind of XSS protection. We will have separate articles on this.
Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey is a very useful Firefox extension that allows you to run your chosen Javascript files for certain web sites to enhance their features or fix their annoyances.
If you know Javascript a bit and feel some web site needs improvement, you can first search userscripts.org which collects many Greasemonkey scripts. Even if you cannot find the ones that fix the annoyances you see with certain web sites, you can do it yourself. It is not that hard. We have a separate article that describes how to write Greasemonkey script for dictionary.com.
Web developer
Web developer provides a lot of support for Web developers who work with Cookies, CSS, forms and etc. It is just like a Swiss army knife for us. :-)
Live HTTP Headers
Live HTTP Headers allows you to view your request headers to web sites and their response headers, so you can debug web applications more easily. You can also modify the old request headers and resend them to achieve replay effect. It is just indispensable for Web development.
HTML Validator
HTML Validator checks HTML file with tidy or OpenSP for errors and shows the results through a small icon in the status bar. Our experiences show that tidy can detect more issues with HTML pages, so don't just rely on the W3C markup validator to check your pages.