My favorite Firefox extensions

Note

This page is about Firefox extensions

For more details, maybe you should first read one of these:

for instance the official Firefox extensions repository,

or on Wikipedia: Extension (Mozilla).

Some lists of extensions

There are a few lists of some useful extensions, kinda sorted by category.

Note

What is an extension?

An extension is an additional piece of program a for your browser. I am focusing on the wonderful Firefox here.

These extensions are somewhat similar to Sublime Text plugins, so if you are interested: I wrote a page about Sublime Text too!

Avis

Might be out-of-date!

This list was written in October 2015, so now it might be a little bit out-of-date... I checked it in May 2016, and it was alright.

AdBlock Plus to completely remove advertising, pop-ups and other vicious things,
InlineDisposition and Open In Browser to always be able to open a document in the browser, instead of downloading it,
NoSquint allows to set the zoom and text zoom settings differently for each websites (just try it, it's awesome),
Speed Tweaks (Speedy Fox) to tweak some parameters of Firefox and improve its speed (just one click to do, it works wonderfully out-of-the-box),
Tab Group restores the old feature of tab grouping, which I consider mandatory (it was removed after Firefox v45+),
Tab Mix Plus adds many useful features if you like to use tabs.

Note

« What about Google Chrome? »

I have never used another browser than Firefox, sorry...

However, it should be easy for you to look for in the Google Chrome extensions store to find extensions similar to the one presented here.

FabTabs colors each tabs with a color representing its page (a Facebook tab will look blue for instance). Simple but awesome!
FlagFox adds a small flag of the country of the website (domain name but also hosting server),
GNotifier and Tab Notifier to integrate the browser notifications into the notification system of your desktop (and to display notifications for some pages that should do it but don't. For example it monitors any change of the page title for example, it works on Facebook, YouTube etc),
Location Bar Enhancer adds feature rich breadcrumb user interface in the location bar (weird at first, magical after),
New Tab Tools greatly improves the "new tab" page,
Tab Wheel Scroll to change tabs with the wheel (I don't use it but it is a nice feature).

Classic Theme Restorer allows to disable some of the new Firefox theme features. This add-on restores squared tabs, the application button with application menu (known from Firefox for Windows), the add-on bar, bookmarks/history menu/sidebar buttons and other buttons,
Customizable Shortcuts allows to customize every single Firefox shortcut (I just use it to disable Ctrl+q and Ctrl+Q... I don't want Firefox to quit without asking me with just a small shortcut!),
Download Status Bar adds nice feature for a better control of the downloading feature in Firefox,
Stylish lets you easily manage user styles: user styles are themes for web sites. I am a huge fan of the sweet github-dark custom style for GitHub. See also my style for live.com and outlook.com (Outlook Microsoft webmail).
Textarea cache will save automatically the content in textarea or "WYSIWYG" editor when you are typing. Then you can recover the saved texts in the cache window, even if the tab or the window was closed unexpectedly.

BetterPrivacy removes useless cookies and Flash cache when closing,
Decentrales allows to locally emulate the Content Delivery Networks. It is a great idea to improve both performance and anonymousness,
Disconnect removes trackers and advertising,
Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus to be able to remove any type of web element (image, banner etc) like if it was an advertising handled by AdBlock,
Facebook Disconnect to completely disable Facebook's default tracking behavior on other websites,
FlashBlock disables by default Flash objects on every page (note: AdBlock or Ghostery offer the same feature). No more auto-played videos...
Ghostery is THE user-friendly tool to disable tracking cookies, tracking beacons and other mini spying softwares that are nowadays on every website (and I have nothing to about it: this website alse uses Google Analytics...),
HTTPS Everywhere protects your communications by enabling HTTPS encryption automatically on sites that are known to support it, even when you type URLs or follow links that omit the https: prefix.
NoScript Security Suite is THE less-user-friendly tool to significantly improve security in Firefox: by default, all unknown javascript programs will be disabled (and many other improvements like XSS checks etc),
SSLeuth ranks an established SSL/TLS connection and gives a brief summary of the cipher suite, certificate and other SSL/TLS parameters,
Toggle Proxy if you use different proxies.

Link Checker to... quickly check links!
Octotree is sweet if you use GitHub a lot.
Quick Locale Switcher to... quickly change the locale settings (the language you ask the pages to be displayed),
Reload Plus to regain control of your cache (Ctrl+F5 reload the page, erasing the local cached version).

All-in-One Sidebar if you like having history, downloads, favorites all in the sidebar (useful on a large screen for example),
Copy as Plain Text if you work a lot with Markdown or other markup languages,
Markdown Here if you want to write fancy emails with Markdown,
Mind the Time allows to to precisely monitor the time you send on the web, each day, week and month, website by website.
about:addons-memory is simple but useful if your Firefox uses too much RAM: it adds a about:addons-memory page displaying the memory use of each addons. If one is using way too much RAM, maybe it's time to uninstall it!