My Must-Have Firefox Add-Ons

When I got a Mac, one of the first things I did was download Firefox. I had used it exclusively on Windows since 1.0 so it was natural to keep using it. Along the way, I stumbled onto Webkit, which promised faster speeds. It did seem faster, both rending pages and starting up so I stuck with it. After the hundredth time it crashed, I switched over to Safari, which is based on Webkit. It crashed less but it had a bad habit of slowing down to a crawl. Back to Firefox I went.

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Now that I'm back to Firefox, I don't know how I made it so long without these extensions:

Adblock Plus

It blocks ads and it works. This includes banner ads and everything else you throw at it. The list of ads it blocks is continually updated and you can block the ones that it doesn't catch.

Inquisitor

This is the one add-on from Safari that I've been waiting for for years. It works in conjuction with the Google Search bar and displays the first few search results as you type. It also learns your habits and moves your most common sites to the top of the list. UPDATE: It is not what firefox does already, it's a lot better.

Speed Dial

This one is inspired by a feature in both the Opera and the Google Chrome browser. It displays nine thumbnails of your most visited sites. You can also set each block to any site you like and have the page be displayed by default or only on new tabs. It is essentially visual bookmarks.

PicLens/Cooliris

I wish the whole web looked like this: it creates a 3D wall of image searches, like Google's Image Search. You can scroll through the wall, see the full version. UPDATE: It also seems to work for some video searches!

Firebug

This one is for the web developers. I cannot work without it. You right click any element on a page and can see its code in the HTML layout and its CSS code. That's just the tip of the iceberg (I know, I don't like that saying either). 

Have I missed your favorite? Let me know below.