Felipe Barriga Richards Blog

Sometimes Firefox can be improved a lot using some tweaks/extensions/addons/scripts. In this post I’m going to show some of them.

Recommended Addons:

• Adblock Plus – Get rip off almost all ads on websites. This also speedup the browser by processing less elements
• BugMeNot – Tired of registering on all websites? Avoid this using public accounts
• DownthemAll! – This download manager connect multiple times to a server and can improve a lot the download speed
• Flashblock – If you have an old computer or your flash support sucks on your O.S., try this to enable only some flash elements and avoid all garbage (specially cpu intensive ads)
• Mobile Barcoder – Need to send text selections or urls to your smartphone/tablet/other mobile device ? This addon will create a QR code with the selected url or the selected text
• User Agent Switcher – Some pages doesn’t recognize Firefox and handle it as a mobile device, showing you a crappy page (yes, that kind of webmaster still exists…).
• Greasemonkey – Add light scripts to your browser in an easy way (and without the need of restart the browser)
• Live HTTP Headers – If you need to debug a site or an ajax script this can save your day. Also useful to develop scripts and automatize tasks based on ‘sniffed’ data
• iMacros – Need to automatize tedious tasks or do some web testing?

Greasemonkey Scripts
Greasemonkey scripts are an easy way of create your own scripts and also use a huge collection of already available scripts. The following scripts can be really useful:

• Allow Password Remembering – Doesn’t what the name says. Ignore the annoying autocomplete=”off” html tag
• Download YouTube Videos as MP4 – Very clear name. It do what it says
• Facebook Friends Checker – Check if one of your ‘friends’ removes you. Every time you access Facebook it store your friend list and then check if there is a change.
• Googleanonymous – Access sites in google results via http://anonym.to
• Google Preferences Without Cookies – Want to configure google without accepting google cookies ? This is for you
• googlePrivacy – Avoid sending all your clicked links in google results to google

Firefox Tweaks

• Google with https and without autocomplete: If you like google but don’t like the autocomplete feature replace your homepage with:
  • https://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0
• If Firefox is eating all your ram memory try with this:
  • Go to about:config and set the following values:
    • javascript.options.mem.max=100000
  • Check the memory stats at about:memory