Recently a few people asked me what Firefox plugins I’ve installed; here’s the list:

• AdBlock Plus does what the name suggests: blocking ads and banners.
• Cookie Monster lets you control which sites are allowed to leave cookies. You can do this on a permanent or a temporary base.
• DOM Inspector inspect or edit DOM or any web document or XUL application live.
• Firebug edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML and JavaScript live in any web page or XUL application. A must have for any web developer.
• FlagfoxDisplays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information.
• FlashblockGot annoyed by Flash animations or auto starting Flash movies in pages? Get rid off them. Blocks Flash, but if you want to see it, just click on it.
• JavaScript Debugger actually called Venkman. Aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers
• Locationbar² puts emphasis on the domain to reduce spoofing risk and some more nifty stuff to the location bar.
• MitM Me overwrites the ‘Get me out of here’ button which you get because of self-signed certifactes and/or expired certifactes with a auto-fetch and automatically adds an exception for the cert. NOTE: This should be used with utmost care, as this can be a highly potential security risk! It’s a perfect tool for developers. Sadly the official version is incompatible with Firefox3.
• NoScript allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks. A must have!
• PDF Download view PDFs directly in Firefox as HTML, download them and use the all-new Web-to-PDF toolbar to save and share Web pages as high-quality PDF files.
• Resizeable Textarea got annoyed by too small textareas in contact or comment forms? Resize them to your needs!
• SwitchProxy Tool lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations.
• Web Developer another must have for web developers,
• YSlow ever wondered why a certain page is slowly rendering? Analyze it with Yahoo’s rules for high perfomance web sites

Got my Firefox T-Shirt last week, so I’m an official Firefox supporter now!

Embedded DIVX video content can be really a pain in the ass — especially when you are running on linux. Well, for those of you, who are already frustrated with installing non-working plugins, here’s the pretty simple 5 step solution.

Step 1: Downloading
Download the MPlayer Plugin pack and store it somewhere, where you will find it again.

Step 2: Extracting
Just extract the tar.gz archive via

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cd /path/to/the/plugin/file
tar xzvf plugins.tar.gz

Step 3: Copying the plugins
Copy the plugins — with root priviledges — to your firefox plugin directory (usually /usr/lib/firefox/plugins)

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sudo cp plugins/* /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

Step 4: Mozilla MPlayer
Although the packed plugins are already the mplayer plugins, you will have to install the mozilla mplayer plugins (dunno if this step is really necessary on non-ubuntu systems).

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sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

Step 5: Enjoy
Lean back and enjoy your embedded divx videos. If you should experience any problems: restart your firefox (closing all instances and re-open. DO NOT restart your computer).

Kudos the PC LINUX OS Community for the plugins.

Those of you, who likes the nifty look of Google’s Chrome, should take a look on ChromiFox, a Chrome-like theme for your Firefox.

The theme is created by the same guy who already did CamiFox, and it’s still in BETA. You must sign to the Firefox addons for installing this theme, as it is declared as ‘experimental’.

ChromiFox works on all platforms (Win/OSX/Linux).

The project TraceMonkey (based on SpiderMonkey) — a JIT-compiler (Just-In-Time) for the JavaScript engine in Firefox — which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Intel and of course Mozilla, has landed in the main Firefox development tree.

Tracemonkey is intended to decrease the JavaScript execution time by incredible 95%. As Firefox itself consists of a lot of JavaScript-Code, Tracemonkey will not only speed up your surfing experience, but also the speed and responsiveness of the application itself.

For more in-depth information and benchmark results check out the blog of Andreas Gal and Michael Franz.

Tracemonkey will be released with the upcoming Firefox 3.1, which will be probably released end of the year.

Jan Odvarko, a member of the Firebug Working Group, has kicked out a set of tutorials on extending Firebug.

• Part 1: Hello World!
• Part 2: Toolbar
• Part 3: Options
• Part 4: Localization
• Part 5: Domplate
• Part 6: Yahoo! Search

Everyone who used one of the recent Opera Browser, knows the advantages of the so-called ‘Speed-Dial’ Feature.

Typing addresses for sites you visit frequently is ineffective. Get your favorite Web page with just one click. Speed Dial is a set of visual bookmarks you see when you open a new tab, like a dashboard for your online life. To add a new page, simply click on an empty Speed Dial and Opera will make suggestions based on browsing history and bookmarks.

Luckily there’s an extension on addons.mozilla.org for getting the same functionality into firefox: FastDial