Best Downloads for Hacking Firefox

by Preston Gralla
Want to bend Firefox to your will, keep yourself safer while you surf, and customize how Google works? These great Firefox extensions will let you do it.

n the battle of the browsers, Firefox clearly beats Internet Explorer in one area--the number of adds-ons (called "extensions") available for strengthening, focusing, and directing the software's power.

You can download hundreds of free extensions to make Firefox do just about anything you can imagine. But I think that the following four stand out from the rest. Give my favorites a try; they may well become yours, too.

Cooliris Previews

Surfing the Web is like walking past a series of dark alleys--before you click on a link, you can't be sure of what lies ahead. But Cooliris Previews shines a light into the dark.

Hover your mouse over a link on a Web page, and a small blue icon appears. Click the icon, and a popup window displays a thumbnail preview of the page, so you can decide whether to go there.

The popup window includes a number of useful tools, including one that lets you lock the preview window so that it stays open, another that lets you open the preview in a new tab, and another that lets you e-mail the link to a friend.

Cooliris Previews is particularly useful during searches: It helps you narrow your search results down to the most useful ones. And it really shines at video sites such as YouTube, because the video plays right inside the popup window when you click the blue icon.

The software has several other nifty features. Select any text on a Web page, right-click, and your selection becomes the basis for a keyword search of various sources, including Google and Wikipedia.

Firefox Showcase

When it comes to tabbed browsing, Firefox falls short of Internet Explorer in one area: the ability to display all open tabs in thumbnail view. Firefox Showcase fixes this shortcoming--and outdoes Internet Explorer's Quick Tabs thumbnail feature.

After installing the extension, you'll find an entirely new Showcase submenu beneath the View menu, with various options for displaying your open tabs in thumbnails, such as by arranging them in a large window that appears on top of Firefox, or by displaying them in a new tab. Or you can forgo the menu in favor of keyboard shortcuts such as - to open the thumbnails in a large window and --Y to display them in a tab.

The thumbnails are pretty to look at, and they're functional. Hold your mouse over one, and you can move forward or back through that tab's browsing history, reload the page, or stop loading the page.

There are dozens of options for changing how Firefox Showcase works, including ways to alter the size of the thumbnails, the thumbnails' borders, and the behavior of the mouse with regard to thumbnails. The defaults are perfectly fine for most users, however.

NoScript

The Web is a dangerous place. As you surf, malicious sites may use JavaScript and Java to exploit security holes in your browser and perform a drive-by download of malware, for example. You may not even know what hit you.

NoScript solves the problem neatly. It disables JavaScript, Java, and scripting on any Web site you visit, but lets you enable it on sites that you know are safe--such as Gmail and your online bank.

When you visit a site that has scripting on it, NoScript will post an alert at the bottom of Firefox, informing you that it has disabled scripts on the page and identifying them. If you want to overrule the program in this instance, click the Options button that appears on the lower right-hand portion of Firefox, and in one additional click you can order NoScript to let the scripts run on the site a single time or permanently.

You can also add pages to the NoScript whitelist--a list of sites that you allow to run scripts--without having to visit each site individually. Choose Tools, Add Ons, and click Options in the 'NoScript' entry; then click the Whitelist tab, and type in URLs of any sites that you want to add to the list.

NoScript comes with a starter whitelist containing Google.com, Gmail.com, and several others. Interestingly, Microsoft.com isn't on the list, though a number of Microsoft-owned sites (including Live.com and MSN.com) are.

CustomizeGoogle

Google has become many people's de facto entry point to the Internet. If you want to tweak how the search site works, you'll love CustomizeGoogle, possibly the most useful Firefox extension you'll ever see.
For example, if you don't like the ads that appear on the right-hand side or at the top of the page, you can use CustomizeGoogle to make them disappear; do a search, and they're gone. The extension can also add links to other search sites, so you can use other search engines directly from Google. And if you add a History link to each search result, it can find old versions of a Web pages. Click the link, and you'll be sent to the WayBack Machine site, which caches old versions of Web pages.

Worried that Google may invade your privacy? The extension can block cookies from being sent to the Google Analytics service, which web site proprietors use to track visitor behavior on their pages.

There's plenty more here as well, such as the ability to customize Gmail by removing ads. You'll find dozens of ways to change how Google and all its services work.