Recently we gave ourselves a lecture on our favourite Firefox extensions. The outcome is not surprising at all … All over the Web you will find various lists of favourite Firefox extensions. And our list does not differ much. That may be because what is best remains best, no matter what.

Here follows the list with only short descriptions of each extension. All of which run on Firefox 1.5 (except the Link Toolbar, which needs a little tweak).

• FLST (Focus Last Selected Tab) is a small but useful extension, that lets you use tabs more effectively.
• The Link Toolbar provides the only way in Firefox to make use of “link (rel/rev)” tags.
• BugMeNot helps you to login or register to Web services, when you do not want to give your real name or e-mail address.
• And the Session Saver does not only save your latest session automatically (including all open tabs), but also several explicitly previously saved and named ones.

• Essentially, ColorZilla lets you pick any colour inside the browser and returns that colour in RGB or Hex.
• The HTML Validator puts W3C's Tidy inside the view-source window and helps a great deal in finding and avoiding html errors.
• The Web Developer Toolbar is the mother of all extensions – a must for any web developer. Its functions are so numerous as they are helpful. I am still surprised sometimes, when I find a new function I have not recognized before. And the more, when I find out that it is the function I have always been looking for.
• Live HTTP Headers shows all HTTP Headers (or only some, if filters are used).

• The HostIP.info Geolocation Plugin displays geolocation info in the tooltip of each link.
• Google Pagerank Status lets you see the Google pagerank of each site you are surfing on. Thus informing you about popularity and search machine friendliness and such.
• AdBlock filters annoying ads from web pages effectively.
• And ForecastFox, finally, lets you see the weather forecast of your (or any other) city.

All in all, it was fascinating to see that many extensions had been installed on many of our company's computers before, but most of our fellow employees did not use them (or not in the least to their full extent). They just did not bother, because they never experienced how powerful they could be.

This is where our lecture proofed very rewarding indeed!