This is a list of firefox add-ons that I use and find very useful.  I will update this entry if I find other very useful add-ons or if the ones of this list lose favor with me.

• Download statusbar: This add-on creates a status-bar at the bottom of the browser to manage downloads, rather than popping up a separate window to manage them, as firefox normally does. Not only does the status-bar save screen real estate, but it also keeps the download manager out of your way.
• NoScript: This is a great add-on for managing which sites can run java, and javascript.  It does this by assuming that a site is forbidden from running java and javascript unless you add the site to a whitelist.  Not only is this add-on good from a security point of view, but it also helps limit how annoying a website can be.
• Swift tabs: Firefox has integrated lots of the support that tabbing add-ons provide, but it still does not have support for keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs.  This add-on allows you assign such shortcuts.
• Snap links: This allows you to use the mouse to draw a rectangle around a group of links on a website, that you wish to view, and each of those links will be opened in separate tabs. This is particularly useful when using search engines.

I recently put Ubuntu 7.04 on a machine with an AMD Athlon 64-bit processor. One of the immediate challenges with just about every 64-bit Linux Distribution is getting Flash and Java browser plugins to work. I found an excellent howto that provides a script to install a 32-bit version of Firefox (and a few other Firefox variants) with plugins for Flash, Java, and mplayer.

Note, in lieu of this approach, you can use a 64-bit browser and install nspluginwrapper to support a 32-bit Flash plugin, as I discuss here. As for Java, you can install a Blackdown Java and a 64-bit Blackdown Java browser plugin through the Synaptic package manager.

Note, if you use CUPS for printing, the printing system will be 64-bit and will not work with your newly installed 32-bit browser. An easy workaround is to print to a postscript or pdf file. Then you can open the file with a 64-bit postscript or pdf viewer and print the file. The default postscript and pdf viewers are 64-bit unless you’ve explicitly changed them.

One bottleneck for web browsing of which many people are not necessarily aware is DNS lookups. For those that don’t know, DNS stands for Domain Name Service. Routers on the Internet do not know what to do with a website name, such as www.espn.com. A DNS server is responsible for translating a website name into an IP address, which routers on the Internet know how to handle, allowing them to route you to the website that you want to visit. So, when you type a website in you browser, a query is first sent to a DNS server to translate the website name into an IP address. Once the translation is done, your browser then requests the webpage from the IP address. If you request a webpage that has content from other websites, then your browser will have to make multiple DNS queries, in sequence. For example, imagine a scenario in which you go to some website called www.xxxxxxxxxx.com that displays a graphic which is located at www.yyyyyyyyyy.com. The following steps will be taken:

1. Your browser will query a DNS server asking it to translate www.xxxxxxxxxx.com into an IP address.
2. Upon receipt of the IP address your browser sends a message to the IP address, asking it for its content.
3. As your browser receives the content, it starts to display it but realizes it needs a graphic from www.yyyyyyyyyy.com. So, your browser makes another DNS query, asking for the IP address of www.yyyyyyyyyy.com.
4. Upon receipt of www.yyyyyyyyyy.com’s IP address, your browser then fetches the graphic.

As you can see, slow DNS lookups can be a bottleneck for browsing. Most people’s home network is configured to use the DNS server provided by their ISP. Unfortunately, that server may be overloaded or may just be slow.  Fortunately, OpenDNS provides free DNS services that are fast, in my experience.  So, if you suspect that slow DNS lookups are a problem, give OpenDNS a try to see if it improves your preformance.

In addition, OpenDNS provides useful features that are not available from normal DNS servers.  For example, if you are about to visit a phishing website, OpenDNS will redirect you to warn you of the danger.  They also attempt to correct spelling mistakes in website names, on-the-fly.  For example, if you type www.espn.cmo on your browser, OpenDNS will still direct you to www.espn.com.  OpenDNS is easy to use also.  Directions for using it are contained on their website.

A nagging problem with 64-bit Linux is that Adobe/Macromedia has not created a 64-bit flash plugin. Most work arounds suggest using a 32-bit browser on 64-bit Linux because there is a 32-bit plugin available.  That can be annoying for a number of reasons. For example, for KDE users, the method suggested here to configure your Firefox fonts will not directly work if you switch to 32-bit Firefox.

Fortunately, there is a way to use the 32-bit flash plugin with 64-bit Firefox. It requires use of the nspluginwrapper. I was able to get Flash Player 9 working with 64-bit Firefox 1.0.8 (the 64-bit version of Firefox available from yum on FC4). I only tested that setup on a few websites, but it worked for the sites I cared about. I took the following steps to get things working

1. I obtained the 32-bit flash player 9 tar file.
2. As root, I copied the libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt files from the tar file to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins and set the permissions to 755 and 444, respectively.
3. I obtained the nspluginwrapper plugin and viewer rpms.
4. As root, I installed the rpms using rpm -Uvh nspluginwrapper-0.9.91.3-1.x86_64.rpm nspluginwrapper-i386-0.9.91.3-1.x86_64.rpm

Note, there are instructions at http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/ describing how to remove, update, or install plugins after nspluginwrapper is already installed.  It is probably more convenient to use the Flash plugin rpm, rather than the Flash Player tar file; however, I had constraints on my system that prevented me from using the rpm.

From time to time, I use the Konqueoror browser/file explorer. Its ability to browse remote files systems through the fish protocol (using ssh) is very powerful. However, one problem that I’ve had with Konqueror is the annoying find dialog box, which gets in the way when you’re trying to search for text within a webpage. I recently came across two solutions to the problem, which unfortunately don’t seem to be well documented.

• A web page can be searched using the search box in the upper right hand corner of the browser. In the search box, the search engine can be changed to “Find in This Page,” to search the current page rather than the web. I was actually aware of this option, but I could never figure out how to find the next instance of the search text, after the first instance was found. I recently discovered if you press F3, it will go to the next instance of the search text.
• The second option, which can be done with out a mouse, is to press / and then type the text for which you are searching. Again, to find the next instance of the search text, hit f3.