One of Firefox's greatest strengths is that it can be extended to provide additional functionality to the end user. However, the vast number of extensions available for Firefox can be a bit overwhelming. We look at that top 10 Firefox add-ons that can improve your productivity on Linux.
Prism
Most of us have one or more Web applications we use extensively throughout the day. It can be useful to split these out of the regular browsing experience into their own “application,” using Prism.
Formerly known as Webrunner, Prism is an extension from Mozilla Labs that let’s you create a single use instance of Firefox as a desktop application. Just grab the extension and browse to the site that you’d like to run separately. Go to Tools -> Convert Website to Application and you’ll get a dialog to choose the URL, name of the application, icon, and the location of the shortcut.
After you’ve created the Prism application, you can launch it separately and run one or more instances of Prism while still using Firefox normally. If you restart Firefox (or it crashes) for some reason, the Prism instances will be unaffected. Likewise, if you end your Prism session, it won’t have any effect on the running Firefox session.
Launchy
As nice as Firefox is, sometimes it’s not the right application for the job. To augment Firefox’s features, you can use Launchy to configure Firefox to open Web pages in new applications, use external apps for FTP and download, external editors, and view media in external players.
The only letdown with Launchy for Linux users is the lack of application autodetection. If you want to use Launchy, you have to edit the launchy.xml file and tell it where to find the applications you want to use.
Google Gears
Web-based applications are great, but typically not so useful when you’re offline. If you depend on Web-based apps, it can be somewhat inconvenient trying to get work done on those cross-country flights.
For a small subset of applications, though, you can use Google Gears — a framework that allows Web application developers to enable offline use as well as the usual online use.
Despite the name, Google Gears can be used with non-Google applications — so, even if you’re not using any Google services, you may still find use for Gears. Sites like Remember the Milk and WordPress.com work with Gears, in addition to Google’s GMail, Reader, Google Docs, and others.
When you load a Web application that supports Gears, it may ask permission to use Gears, or you may have to enable Gears manually. You can choose to enable or deny Gears, or to never allow the site if you don’t want to see the dialog again. After enabling Gears, it will download some data to enable the application to work offline, and then you’re off to the races. You’ll be able to work offline and synchronize data when you’re online again.
Ubiquity
Last, but definitely not least, is Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs project to allow “on-demand, user-generated mashups,” a command-line browser tool that gives fast and easy access to a number of tools and sites.
After Ubiquity is installed, you’ll have a hotkey to display the Ubiquity interface. This is usually Alt-Space, but can be modified. Go to about:ubiquity to change the shortcut to invoke Ubiquity and then take the Ubiquity tutorial to get the basics.
A couple of quick examples. If you want to search Wikipedia for a term, just hit Alt+Space and enter the search term. To translate a section of text, highlight the text you want to translate and then type “translate” and then the language you want to translate it to.
From Ubiquity, you can quickly compose emails using Gmail, look up strings in Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, and many others, map addresses, create bookmarks, and a lot more.
Ubiquity isn’t limited to the commands that come pre-installed. You can create your own, or search for new commands created by “The Ubiquity Herd.” Note that these scripts are not vetted officially by Mozilla, so you’re taking some risk in installing them to run in your browser.
About:End
Of course, Firefox has hundreds of useful extensions, but these are the ones I’ve found to be most useful over time. New ones, however, are being created every day. It’s well worth checking out the Firefox Add-Ons site on a regular basis, or just browsing the recommended add-ons displayed when you go to Tools -> Add-ons. You’ll find plenty of new and interesting extensions to improve Firefox.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at
jzb@zonker.net and follow him on
Twitter.
Comments on "Top 10 Firefox Add-ons for Linux Users"
I know that everyone has their own favourite extensions that save them heaps of time and they’re usually different for everyone, but for productivity on a Linux box (especially with the kinds of users Linux users tend to be) I’d have thought that It’s all text would have to be up there in top ten (or the top twenty anyway). For those who don’t know, it takes any text entry field (the big ones, not the single line ones) like this comment box and let’s you load it up in your favourite text editor (mine is gvim, it needs to be a graphical one). Then when you save the file in the editor, it updates the text box. Simple but really useful. Especially for doing things like editing wiki pages or other things that benefit from full editor treatment.
actually it doesn’t need to be graphical — just use a shell script to launch a terminal with vim — i.e.:
#!/bin/sh
xterm -e vim $1
exit 0
“Also, note that Vimperator’s keybindings may conflict with the keybindings for some Web sites, like GMail or Google Reader.”
This is true — but you can hit Ctrl-Z and it’ll ‘pass through’ all keystrokes until you hit escape to go back to normal vimperator keymode.
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ef5f73c9f4dfd480d5ac2bed27ad6915?s=80 XMarks, formally Foxmarks, has me convinced in extensions. Forecastfox lets know the weather! Cool tool as to hot it will get in Phoenix, Arizona tomorrow.
I’m not sure how some of the site designer tools work.
JJMacey
Phoenix, Arizona
Hi All,
Oops, sort of made a mistake there. But, I hope that I’ve made my point.
Funny, I was just reading in the help about the pass through. Ctrl-V also passes through just the next keystroke (i.e. it doesn’t set up a mode), so if you just need to send keystroke to a page in firefox, just hit Ctrl-V. (Since reading the article I decided to try vimperator again and I’m liking it a lot more now. I’m more familiar with VIM now too though!) Thanks for the tip on using VIM with “It’s all text” though. I’ll probably stick with gvim but it’s good to know.
Cheers!
Thanks for Ubiquity! :)
Well I’ll toss my favourites on the pile :-)
Grease monkey script “Next page” (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/27251) which allows you to use left/right arrows to “click” on next page / previous page. Makes navigating google results, comments, photos, any multipage result easy. (I have a small screen, it’s a pain to scroll down and click on next page, I can surf quite quickly with my arrow keys and pagedown)
Read it later and Tag Sifter … so much better than managing bookmarks.
Find Toolbar tweaks … close the “search box” when I click back on the page (saves time)
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