Etherpunk

Firefox is an exceptionally cool browser. One of it's greatest benefits is the amount of extensions people have written for it. It should be noted that a few bad ones have been seen in the wild, so make sure something asks you to install something and you weren't expecting it -- DON'T.

== Adblock and co. ==

Adblock is an extensions which allows you the abilityt o remove ads. It becomes *really* useful when you use the Filterset.G. It then goes up yet another level of coolness when you use the Filterset.G updater, so it adds new stuff automagically.

They can be found here:

AdBlock
Filterset.G Updater

[[Image:Scrot-with-adblock.png|thumb|200px|left|Firefox w/ Adblock + Filterset.G]]
[[Image:Scrot-without-adblock.png|thumb|200px|none|IE 7]]

== Flashblock ==

I hate it when advertisements use Flash to get my attention or some websites use it as a menu system or some crap like that. I don't like the sounds more than anything.. so this will disable them but place a little play icon in the box so you can single-click it to launch it, should you really want it.
Found here

== IE View ==

IE View places an icon in your FireFox tray that allows your to reload the page using the IE engine.
This extention can be found here

== XRay ==

Allows you to view the sourcecode to web pages WHILE browsing.
It seems to fail when using frames through.
This one can be found: here

== Gmail Notifier ==

If you use a gmail account (if you want one, email me or post and I'll give you one.. I have 100 invites) then this can monitor that account for new email.
Found here

== FasterFox ==

You can manually tweak Firefox via about:config (type it in your address bar and hit enter) or this extension can tweak it for you.
Found here

== Downloadsort ==

If you download many things a day, such as JPG's of comics or something then you might like this extension.
You can feed it a file extension and have it automatically download those files into a certain directory. You can even have dated directories such as comics/2006.02.02 and have it dump it in the 2006.02.02 directory. Rock on.
Found here

== PDF Download ==

Becuase when viewing a PDF inside of Firefox it takes a while to load this prompts you asking if you want to simply download it (and view it in another program) or actually view it in the browser.
PDF Download can be found here

== Link Alert ==

Link alert will give you a small icon when you hover over links and files. For example, when a link points to a PDF file your cursor will have a PDF icon hover next to it.

Link alert can be found here

== Restart Firefox ==

This extension adds a quick and easy method to restart Firefox and keep the same tabs. This is useful when you add new extensions or themes.

Found here

Firefox is an open source browser released under the GNU Public License. It has many advantages over Internet Explorer 6 and still some over Internet Explorer 7. So far their is one huge bug in the sense that it can become a memory hog. The other drawback is it can't do ActiveX or some IE proprietary things. For those reason you should not remove Internet Explorer however use it as little as possible. The next rev is Firefox (3.0) will supposedly pass the Acid2 test (something which few browsers do at the time of this writing) and help reduce member footprints.

== Drawbacks ==

Some times don't work well in Firefox -- this is usually because of the web developer. Most users don't care whose fault it is. Firefox has an extensions that allows you to quickly swap to Internet Explorer. I don't use it that often as few sites I go to have this problem. I'd love to find a list of Internet Explorer only sites. Internet Explorer is very forgiving when it comes to the HTML code of web pages, while other browsers tend not to be. This is good and it's bad. Sometimes Internet Explorer has it's own method of doing things that require special hacks to get around. From personal experience, this is rarely the case with Firefox as it's usually Internet Explorer that deviates from standards -- not Firefox.

== Windows Update ==

IE is still required for Updating your Windows box. Well, Firefox _can_ be used for that but it can be a little complicated and not worth the hassle under most circumstances.

== Themes ==

Firefox has some nifty themes. Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox can skin (theme) itself without the use of other software. Their are many themes to make your FF lean or pretty and some can be found here (sometimes this site is slow).

== Extensions ==

Where Firefox really shines is it's extensibility. Extensions such as AdBlock and Flashblock make life, at least for me, much better.