Size Doesn’t Matter – 10 Tiny but Highly Useful Firefox Extensions

One of the key strengths of the Firefox is the level of extensibility that it provides through the use of extensions. Because of the open-source nature of Firefox and some other related reasons there is a huge community of developers that are actively building new extensions and updating the older ones to be compatible with the new versions of this browser. Already official Firefox extension repository is approaching 2,000 Firefox extensions(currently hovering at 1989) and there are many other extensions floating around that are not listed here or in the Mozilla Sandbox. You can get a Firefox extension for any imaginable(or unimaginable) purpose you can think of doing in a web-browser.

But one of the problems of installing many extensions to extend the Firefox functionality is that browser will start to slowdown after you have installed too many extensions. So I thought an idea to bring you the some tiny extensions that will have minimal impact on the performance of the Firefox after installation but still provide some very useful functionality that is not available originally in Firefox. I have used the term tiny because all of the extensions I have listed here are about 20 KB or even less in size and mostly they are created with a specific task in mind rather than to cover an entire array of features(remember TabMixPlus?).

This list is sorted on the extension sizes(as of the current latest version till this writing). Please note that exact extension sizes can vary version to version so take them as just an approximate measure. It is also worth mentioning that all of the extension are personally tested and used by myself on more or less regular basis. Not all extension will work by-default in Firefox 3.0 nightlys but to force compatibility you can always use Nightly Tester Tools.

Lest start the countdown…

1. Oldbar 

In Firefox 3.0 Mozilla has changed the style of URL bar from displaying single-line(or row) addresses and other information for each entry to two-lines to display each entry. Now first-line shows the icon and title of the website in question and the second line displays website address. But not everyone is pleased with this move because this new styling of URL bar consumes more space to show the same number of addresses. In case you don’t like the new look of URL bar you can easily revert to the Firefox 2.0 style of consuming a single line/row to show a single website addresses, it’s title and icon.

2. ColoUnREaDTabs

This is also a very simple extension that colors the newly opened tabs that have loaded but still unread. Red color and italic font style is used to differentiate these tabs from the normal read tabs.

3. FileTitle

By default in Firefox when a webpage is saved by using the Save Page as option in the File menu, Firefox will save it as “index.htm” unless user changes the name to same meaningful name in the context of the current page. This is very annoying if you want to save a lot of pages this way because each time you will have to fill-out the proper html name manually. FileTitle saves the day by pre-filling the file name field using the HTML Title tag of the currently loaded page. Now you will just have to press the Save button in the Save dialog without the need to fill-out a proper name for the page you are going to save. This behavior is by default already there in Internet Explorer though.

4. Extended Statusbar

Displays some useful statistics related to the currently loading page such as Image Count , Webpage Size(loaded so far), Average Speed and Page Loading Time. This is similar to how opera displays stats in the URL bar.

5. Context Search

Allows to search for currently selected text from the Firefox main context-menu. It will automatically load all the installed search engines in the current Firefox installation and populate the context-menu.

6. Highlighter

Highlight any word or phrase in the current webpage using any of the five pre-configured colors in the extension. Highlighting colors can customized. Access is easy through a toolbar button or you can access the highlighting feature from the context-menu.

7. External Application Buttons Mod

This extension allows to launch external windows application from with-in the Firefox by allowing to create customized buttons that are created specifically to launch an application. I have already written in detail about the use and features of this extension in a previous article.

8. Ctrl-Tab

Ctrl-Tab allows to pimp-up the Ctrl+Tab switching feature by providing a visual preview of all the opened tabs in the current Firefox window. Also adds a button to the right-side of the tabbar to access the tab catalogue. When accessed by using the button on the tabbar, a user can also dynamically filter the tabs in the catalogue based on the currently opened webpage’s titles in the current Firefox window.

9. BugMeNot

This is a very useful extension if you regularly visit a lot of password protected websites that will not allow you to access any contents without a compulsory registration process. You can bypass this annoying registration process on most of these kind of websites by using the BugMeNot Firefox extension. You can also manually acquire login and password information for these websites from the BugMeNot website but this extension automates the whole process and is faster and more convenient to use.

10. Bazzacuda Image Saver

This is somewhat a unique extension that allows to automatically save all the open/loaded images in tabs of the current Firefox window to a user specified folder and will optionally close all those image tabs as well after-words. I can imagine that some people will really love it to quickly save a lot of images that they have opened in different tabs.