I don't go hogwild with all the extensions and add-ons and stuff like that. I just have Forecastfox and the download toolbar really. But the coolest thing?

I was composing a blog post and my sample ballot post here on MeCha and had several other tabs open when the thing crashed.

So I started back up and Firefox calmly asked me if I wanted to recover my work. I said yes and didn't lose ANY of the stuff I'd done before the crash.

I started to dance.

Oh cool!! Recovering a crashed session is the one feature I've still missed since I switched from Opera a few years back... that's excellent news.

I disliked Forecastfox on an older version, as it seemed to slow down my Mac G4 considerably. I'm on a PC now, though. Maybe I'll give it another, fresh start.

I definitely don't go hogwild with extensions, but I really like Image Zoom, Linky, and of course Adblock.

I'm almost looking forward to having to recover from a crash now. Was that with 2.0?

...and I stole 'hogwild' from you, Wolfie. Apologies.

item and foxfire 2 sitting in a tree

k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

Fist comes love
then comes marriage
then come iconomy
with another man
for in an ideal world
he's be allowed to marry said man
and everything'd be just fine.

I really should've slept last night.

If you think iconomy's a man, then yeah, you DO need some rest, item! ;D

*gasp*

I suppose I'll start paying attention now.

Fist comes love

Teehee...

*bats eyelashes at item*

I have not as yet figured out how to get a .pdf file automatically opened in Firefox 2. If I really really need to open a pdf, I go over to IE to do it, as dorky as that sounds.

item: Ok, I'm guessing that you've not used FF before? ok. If you have the option enabled, you can open like 3 windows, and then close them, and then when you re-open FF, they'll be there. I currently have the option off, as I've found that FF reloads the pages and if I've had 4 open, and haven't looked at them in a day or so, it noticably increases the initial load time of FF. Had an actual crash the other day, and upon restarting, a dialogue box comes up and asks you if you want to revert to the tabs that were open last time. Neat.
FF2 tweaks page.
The very first time I clicked on the 'x' on the tab, and then killed the page I wanted to refer to? AAGH! I got rid of that, and went back to FF1.5 version. (browser.tabs.closeButtons - change the Value to '3')
Plug-ins I use: ForcastFox. No noticeable system slowdown (I have 1 gig of RAM, which maybe why).
Adblock. Handy. Necessary.
Greasemonkey. Very VERY handy. Scripts: A whole bunch of ad-skipping ones to sites I visit (i.e. IMDb, GameSpot, YouTube), 2 MySpace ones that strip just about everything from MySpace pages and disable all the media. HA! Another pop-up killer script, Salon premium pass, and the MetaFilter 'show deleted posts on the front page' script.
IE Tab, which switches the rendering of a page from FF to IE, and back.
BugMeNot. Because it's good.
DownThemAll - a quick mass-downloader
Down Load Status Bar. Maybe I really didn't need it, but I thought why not.
Flashblock - stops Flash from playing on all websites, replaces the Flash with a clickable button that'll allow you to see it.
and finally Foxy Tunes, an extension of your mp3 player, placed in the browser.
Add-ons are here.

So far I'm, like, "meh."

Zack, I've been using FF for maybe 2 years now. I just like the new version and I'm not sure why. I don't know - maybe my life is dullsville these days. Oh, and thanks for the tips. I've played with most of those and settled on the ones I like. Unless I just completely missed it on older versions, I'm smitten by the word-processoresqe spell check in dialog boxes, what with the underlining and everything. I'm an okay speller but a sloppy typist.

FYI:
If you don't want to upgrade just for the crash recovery feature, SessionSaver has been doing it on 1.x for a while. It's a favorite extension.

The Metafilthy extension makes reading Metafilter sooo much easier. It lets you return to the last comment your previous visit to a thread. I guess you can accomplish the same thing with Greasemonkey, but I haven't ventured their yet.

The other extensions I use:
- DictionarySearch - right click menu option to look up a highlighted word
- Wikipedia Lookup Extension - same as above
- Search Engine Ordering - lets you re-arrange the search engines in the search toolbar (change engines by hitting ctrl+up/down arrow). I was re-ordering these myself using about:config, but this is much easier.
- Chatzilla as my IRC client
- Nightly Tester Tools - allows you to force old extensions to be compatible with new versions of Firefox (this is how I got Metafilthy to work on FF 2.0)
- del.icio.us extension

My favorite thing about Firefox is that it lets me create a custom search engine toolbars. I created one to look up SEC financial documents by stock ticker--it improved my productivity dramatically. It even let me include a little icon for it.

Plain text to link - highlight a non-encoded URL on a page, right-click and go to it. Also has loads more, really useful functionality

Adblock plus (blocks almost every advert on every web page and, unlike the original Adblock, you can pull in someone else's pre-written, fairly definitive list of blocked items)

British English Dictionary (for FF2's spull chocker)

Stop/reload button (a la Safari - why waste real estate on 2 buttons?)

ColorZilla (essential for web designers - use this to get HEX and RGB values straight from web pages. You can then copy that value into graphics apps, CSS pages and so-forth. Again, a massive time saver)

del.icio.us (for easy bookmarking and lookups)

Download statusbar (nice, but not essential)

Download Them All (this is a massive time saver + the only extension I've donated money for. You can pick any/all the images or links on a page and download the whole lot in one go to the location of your choice. Comes with a download manager, the ability to write your own filters, and more. Essential)

Paste And Go 2 (this is a default feature in Opera and is fantastic when copy+pasting URLs from other browsers/documents/email/whatever. Also works as "paste and search" in the search box)

Professor X (one-click inspection of a page's head content)

Tab clicking options (allows you to specify actions for clicking/double clicking on tabs/toolbars etc)

Web developer (the essential extension for any web developer)

View Source Chart (I would have been lost without this recently. This extension is essential if/when you come to modifying documents with JavaScript. If, for example, you add a class to an object using JS, this extension will show you the class applied to whatever you tried to apply it to.

Tails Export (for exporting Microformats. No sign of a FF2 version yet, annoyingly)

Screen grab! (allows the taking of full-page-length screen shots that can be saved as a single image onto the desktop. Again, no working FF2 version yet)

HTML validator

FireBug (doing JavaScript and/or DOM work? This is really, really handy)

X-Ray (see the HTML superimposed onto the page. On occasions, really handy)

My brother swears by Gmail notifier. Me, I don't want their software on my machine.

If you're looking for a PDF reader that isn't so monolithically huge, buggy, slow and filled with features you just. don't. need. then Foxit Reader is well worth a look.

Oh yeah, there' also:

Search bar auto sizer for expanding the search bar for long strings of text

Stealther for, well, y'know...

mullacc: you can do search engine ordering in FF2 without the need for an extension. Also, was it easy to build your own FF search engine? I'm looking to do something for work.

I tried it and went back to 1.5 because the ImageShack right-click uploader extension doesn't work with it, nor does the ImageShack toolbar. And if I can't steal bunny pics off the web and upload them with a single click, then it's you guys who'll be the losers.

TheDonF: Ah, I forgot that FF2.0 had re-ordering. I didn't have it install at work until a few minutes ago.

Anyway, I read this to learn how to make a search engine.

Basically, for my search engine, I created a text file in Notepad with the following in it:

<search
version="7.1"
name="10K Wizard"
description="10K Wizard Filing Search"
action="http://10kwizard.ccbn.com/fil_list.asp"
searchForm="http://10kwizard.ccbn.com/fil_list.asp"
method="GET">
<input name="TK" user>

</search>

Then save it as NameAsYouWantItToAppearInToolbar.src, then save that in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins, or I think you can also save it in a "searchplugins" folder in your Profile. Then find a favicon to go with your search engine and name it the same as the .src file (but with a .png extension, obviously) and save it in the same place.

FF2.0 appears to be taking the .src file/favicon and creating an XML file once you run it.

Greased Lightbox

cheers mullacc :)