Welcome to Gaia! ::

This is just a simple little thread that I thought I would make for anyone in the guild who uses firefox (and feel free to share this with others too!). I have been randomly browsing the add-ons that the browser offers lately and I thought I would share some of the great stuff I found. I must say that some of them are absolutely things that no firefox user should live without! So in this thread I will list useful add-ons that I have found (ie. the ones I use!) and feel free to discuss any you find too!

(If you need any help setting the options up on any of these just ask!)

1 heart = not necessary but still good, an extra bit of help, etc
2 heart = pretty useful if you need/use it, etc
3 heart = really great!, things I really love, etc
4 heart = MUST HAVE!
3nodding = Firefox recommends it!

3nodding heart heart heart 1-ClickWeather = This displays the weather. You can set it for an extended forecast, you can have it show a Doppler view of your area of the US, its from weather.com/The Weather Channel so you know the info is accurate, its really compact too (just like the example pic) and once you get the settings to how you want it you don't have to do anything but enjoy finding out what the weathers gonna be like in one simple glance.

3nodding heart heart heart heart Adblock Plus = This blocks ads on sites and it is an ESSENTIAL add-on for firefox! It has a list of preset filter options (just select your location) too so nearly all ads will be gone without you having to do anything and the rest can be gone with just a few simple clicks. Seriously add this now.

3nodding heart heart heart AnyColor = This add-on basically makes your firefox have an easily editable skin. Change colors for text/background/highlight, add pictures (even your own! although there is a size restriction for viewable area), use presets or save your own styles, and you can even add cool little tweaks too! (I recommend contrast: lighter menus, compatibility: colorful tabs[for another add-on if you use it], Misc: window strips, & Misc: compact main window). And on top of that they have a nice big gallery of premades that you can pick from!

heart heart Babelfish = This is great for anyone who browses site in different languages. Translate just a word or the entire page (this takes a while though obviously)! Also it can detect what language something is too. It has a ton of different languages to pick from, translate both to and from for each one. Its simple and quick, just highlight the text, right click and tell it to translate and a little box will show up with the translation. (I have another translator that I like for little things but this one is great cause it does the whole page!)

heart heart heart Cluster Tabs for Firefox = If you ever have more tabs open then your tab bar will show for, projects or whatever, then this will be great! It allows you to make basically a super tab hehe it adds little plus' to the tabs and when you click on one it creates the cluster tab. Once you have one made you can click on the plus and say add to such and such cluster and it will show up in the cluster and the long list of tabs in the bar will go away while you still have all the tabs open. Plus it cuts down on lag from having to open a lot of tabs at once so its great for dailies and such. Also when you close the tab it goes right back in the cluster so you don't have to worry about losing it!

3nodding heart heart heart ColorfulTabs = This is useful if you are a visual person like me and even if your not. All it does is color code the tab bar so, say, all the google tabs will be green and all the yahoo tabs will be yellow or something. And you can change the colors to whatever you want too. It helps a lot for remembering which tabs are which.

3nodding heart heart Cool Previews = This certainly does make your browsing go faster. It provides a little icon that you click that will allow you to see a preview of what's on the page connected to the link. And you can use the little preview window to browse a bit too! So you can look around a bit and if you decide you don't like it, all you have to do is click back on the main screen and you'll have never left the search page. It can be a tad annoying though cause the preview icon shows up whenever you go over a link so for smaller links it can cover things up sometimes but that is easily fixed by just moving the mouse around a bit. It also works in image searches too so you don't have to open the link to get to the image to save it...saves a lot of time!

3nodding heart heart heart Download Statusbar = If you download a lot of stuff then this is very handy. Rather than having to open the download window and have something else cluttering your desktop and taskbar, this just makes a little bar above the status bar at the bottom for all your downloads that disappears once everything is finished and cleared. You won't have to change windows to see if your downloads are finished anymore!

3nodding heart heart heart DownloadHelper = Basically essential if you want to download things from like youtube or something. Its a tad annoying that it downloads things in .flv format but if you have the VLC Player then it doesn't matter. Anyway, given that videos on youtube are never guaranteed to always be there or if you ever want to watch something without going through the hassle of going to the site and finding it, then this is something you should get! Just download the video to your computer and watch it whenever!

More to be added later...seriously I have over 50 different Add-Ons xd

time for another round hehe

3nodding heart heart Fireshot = This one comes in very handy if you use the "Print Screen" button a lot. You can set it to take a picture of the whole page or just a selection which is super awesome as it save so much time when you don't have to print screen for each section cause it won't all fit on the screen at once. Plus its easy to use as you just hit the hot keys and save it. No more needing to open paint to save a screen image!

3nodding heart heart Flagfox = This add-on is good if your big on knowing details about the websites you go to. It puts a little flag in your url bar that says where the server is located and when you right click on it you can find out things like exactly where the server is, the IP, and other such things. But if you don't really care about any of that then its not really useful.

heart heart heart heart Flashblock = If flash animation and all that bugs you and slows your computer down to hell then this add-on is essential! You can set a whitelist for which sites can play flash and all the other will be blocked. And if you want to turn on a flash thing on a blacked page all you have to do is hit the little f/play button and it will run, but only that one thing so you never have to worry about your computer being bogged down by flash again. Seriously this is essential for gaia because of all the damn aquarium flash that just freezes my computer! xd (Although I don't know how and if this effects Booty Grab just yet since I don't play much, if at all.)

3nodding heart heart heart Foxclocks = This, like the weather one above is SO nice! If you have friends all over the US or even the world (which, being on Gaia is almost a guarantee!) then this is great! It lets you keep track of any and every timezone and even specific places! It is compact too and it does the whole day shift thing too. Plus if your like me and have your taskbar set to hide when your not using it, this add-on helps by not having to always scroll over the taskbar to see what time it is!

3nodding heart heart heart FoxyTunes = If you listen to music while your online this is a great add-on! It not only saves you all the trouble of having to switch between programs to change songs and all that but it also allows you to look up information on the song/artist/whatever extremely easy. It doesn't clutter things up either, fully extended it takes up a small bit of space in a little toolbar, but you can minimize it down to just a single button when your not using it too! Plus they have skins for it to which means you can customize it to match your firefox theme. And they also have a feature that lets you insert what song your listening to right into your posts! Unfortunately, its apparently not set up completely for Gaia Forums yet so it only works in guild posts, but hey, that's fine with me smile I told them about this too so hopefully it will work everywhere soon!

3nodding heart heart GogglePreview = This is another one of those visual things. It places a thumbnail image next to the links in Google and Yahoo searches so you can see what the page looks like before you click on it. Its a quick identifier for well known pages like Wikipedia and all that but there are a view drawbacks. You can't make the image any big which is not necessarily bad cause its pretty good already (and you can just use coolpreviews too) but also it only shows the main homepage and not the actual page that the link will go to so it is slightly misleading in that regard but its still good for what it does.

3nodding heart heart heart Hyperwords = I love this add-on! It does soooo much with just one little menu! It is set up to come up automatically when you highlight something which can be annoying but you can change that, I have mine set up to be in my context menu so all I have to do is right click. But seriously you can do some much, highlight something and this add-on lets you search for it, look it up on reference cites, lets you shop for it on your preferred sites like amazon or ebay, it translates right there on the page, does all sorts of conversions, and more! Its so nice to be able to highlight a word I don't understand and with just a flick of my wrist have it open up a tab to dictionary.com with the word already there and giving me the definition 3nodding Or to just as easily have something converted from YEN to USD.

ok enough for now but I still have more and some are seriously super! And some will even be a god send to anyone who uses forums hehe

hehe yay! glad to hear the list is helpful biggrin and there are still more to come! but I have to finish my entry for Des' contest first!

I had planned to look into BetterGaia, what you think of it Des?

Also, since I finally got all my add-ons reinstalled and option set on my new computer I can continue this yay! I am also going to update the above a bit too!

----------------
Winamp: Sarah Polley - Courage

I'll have to look into that then, but for now I will finish this up before I add anything new hehe

heart heart heart IE Tab = This is great for people who hate having to open IE in order to update windows or for all those websites out there that are only formatted to work in IE. It lets you change just one tab over to IE while your still in Firefox and back again. You can open any tab in IE with it too, its super easy!

3nodding heart heart heart Lazarus: Form Recovery = This is essential for anyone who posts in forums! It saves what you type so you never have to worry about losing it and having to retype it. All it takes is a simple right click and everything is back! You can make it password protected too if your worried about privacy (only have to enter the password once per firefox session). Seriously, download this now!

heart heart heart Link Status = If your like me and are constantly searching for info and such then this is very helpful. It shows a little star in the left hand bottom corner (yellow is bookmarked, white if not) for any page you have already visited. All you have to do is hold your mouse over the link, you don't even have to click on it! Don't ever worry about wondering if you've been to that site before, now you can know for sure! The only problem I have with this one is its location, its kinda small and easy to ignore you know? Hopefully that changes with future updates, but until then its still useful!

heart heart heart Linkification = Oh do I love this add-on! It turns text links into real clickable links! No more having to copy and paste into the url bar! It saves so much time and you can make it so that the color/background of these particular links is a different color so you know where its working. This is pretty much an essential add-on for people who use forums cause it save you having to do a lot of extra work just to go to a link someone provided.

heart heart heart Menu Editor = Another add-on I simply adore! If your like me and have lots of add-ons then you know how cluttered your right click can become, or if you just get annoyed that the one thing you always click is so far down the menu, then you should seriously get this add-on! It allows you to edit which options show up on which menus, you can even hide the menu entirely! Rather then having 10 options when you right click, make it show only two (or whatever you want). This one can be a bit confusing cause there are a lot of different options for some menus but I can help with that!

3nodding heart heart heart Mouse Gestures = Oooo the first complex one hehe the reason it is complex is because the current version doesn't work with 3.5, however if you go to their site and install Mouse Gestures version 2.1.4 then it works fine! Anyways, this add-on is fun as well as useful. It allows you to use your right mouse button to preform commands like go forward/back, move to another tab, even save the tab as a bookmark. Its pretty simple and rather useful if you don't want to have to be moving the mouse all around just to do simple things like closing the tab. My only complaint is that you have to do things a tad slow so that they get recognized. For those with fast wrist movements who want to just blow through it really fast like me hehe it forces you to slow down a tad to get it to work, but its nothing overly annoying. The usefulness by far outweighs all that!

alright that's enough for now! but in the next installment I promise another super helpful forum add-on like the Lazarus one 3nodding and I have exactly twenty more add-ons to list before I run out of things I use to put on here lol so expect a few more updates still xd

lol nice xd

lol yeah Mouse Gestures is pretty great biggrin as for Adblock, no it does not stop you from seeing aquariums as they are not advertisements. You might be thinking of Flashblock though because that does block them because they are flash. However that is easily fixed by just adding Gaia to flashblock's whitelist.

hehe yay its so worth it!