What's in your Browser?

2009-11-26T11:16:00+00:00

The official Chrome Extensions page is coming and soon I'll be seriously considering making a switch to my default browser setting. While Chromium (the open source component of Chrome) is a fantastically speedy, low memory and nimble browser it's lack of extensions if the main thing holding me back from making the fully committed switch. I already use it to access my various Google applications and it's also useful for accessing last.fm radio as when the Flash plugin goes mad I don't have to kill my entire browsing session. With the discovery of the Greasemonkey based AdSweep I can even move my Google Reader browsing across to Chromium without suffering from animated banner induced madness.

However Firefox still has a number of killer Add-On's which would need to be ported before I can throw the switch. These include:

Firebug

Firebug has become an indispensable tool as I've done more JavaScript based hacking. I literally would not attempt to develop anything client side scripting based without this tool by my side.

It's All Text

This simple tool allows me to spawn an Emacs client to edit any text area on a web-page. It's what I use when I'm making blog posts and pretty much any non-trivial amount of web based text entry. While it might be tempting to do the Greasemonkey treatment to something like Ymacs to get something close to the Emacs experience there is really no substitute for the real thing. Especially, as you may have noticed, when you want to insert code snippets into your posts.

<h3>It's All Text</h3>
This simple <a href="http://trac.gerf.org/itsalltext">tool</a> allows
me to spawn an Emacs client to edit any text area on a web-page. It's
what I use when I'm making blog posts and pretty much any non-trivial

No Script

The Web 2.0 experience is certainly a good thing, browsers have certainly moved from being a presenter of static pages to being a platform where all sorts of fantastic stuff can be done. However I still like to have control over who gets to run code in my browser.

I used to have Bug Me Not in my list of must-have extensions but to be honest I just skip stuff that requires registration these days. I'm looking forward to Murdoch's content dropping off the search engines radar when he finally learns to use robots.txt.

So are there any extensions essential to your Firefox experience? Or have you already made the jump to Chrome(ium)? Or do you still see something in Opera that I never could?

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - browsers

What's in your Browser?

Firebug

It's All Text

No Script