I recently did some hunting for FireFox extensions, and found a few interesting ones that I'd like to share with y'all:

Cookie Manager Button

This lets you add a new button to your toolbar called "cookies". When clicked, it will take you straight to the interface for managing browser cookies. It's simple, but saves a few clicks from having to go through settings.

EM Menu

Adds a new item to the Tools menu called "Extensions". Click on that brings up a sub-menu which contains a list of your extensions. Clicking any of them brings up the options for that extension. Again, it saves clicks and the popping up of the extensions window.

Fission

If you've ever used Safari on a Mac, you'll like this one. It combines the progress bar and the address bar. So now when you load a page, the background of the address bar fills in with blue as the page loads.

Session Manager

This notes the current state of how many tabs are open, and what apge is loaded in each tab. You can manually save sessions and restore them later. Alternatively, you can even configure this extension to automatically save your session when you close Firefox and to restore that session when starting Firefox. Regular session backups can also be made, in the event of a crash.

Restart Firefox

Adds a "Restart Firefox" menu item to the File menu. As with most all software, Firefox is not perfect, and it does seem to contain a few memory leaks which cause it to become slower over time. When it gets too slow, it usually makes sense to restart the browser. This extension makes it a little easier. Plus, with Firefox 2.0 supporting sessions by default, you can now pick up where you left off. Works nicely with Session Manager.

Splash

A simple little module to display a customizable splash screen when FireFox starts up. Works nicely with Restart Firefox.

SubmitToTab

When submitting a form, this module lets you right click on the button and choose to submit that form to a new tab or new window. This is handy if you are doing web development, or just want to be a power user and run different searches from Google without having to load Google into separate tabs.

Passive Cache

If you come across a link that isn't responsive due to being Slashdotted or whatever, just right-click on it. Then choose whether you want to load it from Google's cache or view archived copies of it on the Wayback Machine.

LiveJournal Addons

Finally, the extension for all of you LiveJournal junkies! This extension will monitor your friends page and message center. It will also notify you of upcoming birthdays, and claims to be able to manage styles as well. There are quite a few features in this module, and I haven't been able to test them all.

Yes, web browsers are becoming more and more complex, and with plugin-based browsers such as FireFox, they are actually starting to represent operating systems. That brings me to this article, which contents that FireFox is really starting to make traditional operating systems obsolete. I'm not sure if I can agree with all of what is in that article, but the author does cover some interesting ways to perform everyday tasks using currently available web-based software.

Finally, some folks might remember me complaining about how slow FireFox 2 was for me awhile back. It turns out that the culprit was a module called Firebug. Firebug is awesome for web development, as it performs "inspection" of document elements, and will show the surrounding HTML as well as all styles (both applied and overridden) for the element that you are inspecting. The downside is that it really bogs down the browser. Even when you are not actively inspecting elements, there was quite an impact on the responsiveness of the browser, which was a shame. So I disabled the module and Firefox is running fine again. Ah, if only there was a module that did profiling on function calls and events in other modules...

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