Firefox Add-ons

I’ll try out new Firefox add-ons here and there, but not all are keepers. These are five I can’t live without and would recommend to friends and loved ones over a light Sunday brunch or a sunset excursion on the Rhine.

1. StumbleUpon

SU is to the web what Pandora is to music. Tell SU what interest you and it will recommend similar sites. It’s like having a “channel up” button right on your web browser.  One great feature is the “Share” button on the SU toolbar that lets you quickly send a site to another SU user or an email address.http://video.stumbleupon.com is also an excellent way to discover video clips aligned with your interests, even if you’re only interested in videos of people haphazardly hurting themselves.

2. Delicious Bookmarks

There are plenty of similar tools and add-ons that will let you store your bookmarks online as Delicious will.  I can’t say I’ve tried them, though, since Delicious does the job so well. Just tag the site you want to bookmark with one or two keywords and where ever you, where ever you go, it will be right there waiting for you, just like Richard Marx. Even if you don’t have Firefox your or the add-on installed, you can still access your bookmarks by hitting http://delicious.com/yourusername. Too easy.

3. FastDial

If you liked the home page Google’s Chrome browser gave you but not enough to make the switch, Fast Dial will give you aclose approximation. FastDial lets you tile your Firefox home page with clickable thumbnails of your favorite sites. Sure, you could put those same sites up on your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, but this just looks so gosh darn snazzy.Only bummer is that it doesn’t render Flash in the site preview. Maybe the preview generator runs on an iPhone.

4. Search Preview

This add-on will insert small previews of each site listed on a Google, Bing or Yahoo search results page, so it’s easier to quickly identify sites you may have visited once before.It will also show each site’s popularity on a tiny bar graph. Like FastDial, it’s not a must-have, but just looks pretty.

5. WiseStamp

If you use Gmail or Yahoo for your email, this add-on will allow you to automatically insert a spiffy email signature into the messages you send.  I’ve tried some other methods and none worked quite as well as WiseStamp. It’s especially good if you use your email account for business. Include a logo, a link to your website, your Twitter account, and so on and so on, and so on.