10 Little Known but Incredibly Useful Firefox Extensions

Firefox has gained its popularity not only because it is a very secure browser but it has those hundreds of very productive extensions. It has been years The Popular Extensions column of Mozilla Addons is showing only those 5 extensions. But there are number of other extensions which are incredibly productive but is very little known about. Here are my top 10 little known Firefox extensions. There are no. of very popular and useful extensions available but in this post I've listed only the newest extensions. And the good news is - all of these extensions (except Netscape Link Pad) run smoothly in Firefox 3 and above!

10. Yet Another Smooth Scrolling63
If you are one of those guys who read a lot of texts on screen regularly and have to regularly scroll up and down, this extension is for you. The default scrolling of any browser is very jerky. This extension customizes the overall scrolling of your page allowing you to scroll your page smoothly without giving much stress to your eyes. There are three presets scrolling indicated by red, green and blue. You can customize the smoothness, stride size and acceleration sensitivity of both mouse and keyboard of each of the presets. You can quickly change your preset either from the context menu or from a small icon on the status bar.
*Version supported: 1.5 – 3.0b3

9. Mouseless Browsing (MLB)
This extension comes in handy if you own a laptop and feel difficult to use your touchpad to move the cursor to a link. It numbers every hyperlinks on a page and you can simply type its number and hit enter to follow the hyperlink. Not only for hyperlinks, it comes with other shortcuts for a better mouseless browsing experience such as scrolling the page, going history back or forward etc. The shortcut keys can be changed easily. You can change the style of the numbers in its option dialog box. If you don't like those numbered links or you find them visually irritating, you can turn it on or off with just a key on the fly.
*Version supported: 1.5 – 3.0b3

8. Fancy Numbered Tabs
Very few of us know that we can easily switch to Firefox tabs just by pressing Ctrl+Tab No. It is a very easy way to navigate through the open tabs with keyboard. But if there multiple tabs are open, it is very difficult to guess the number of a tab. This extension replaces the Close Tab button with a number making easy to navigate quickly through tabs.
*Version supported: 2.0 – 3.0a9

7. Auto Context
I work in a parking office where I've to sometimes open up a secure webpage and copy-paste vehicle information into our database. I get very fed up to select text, right-click the mouse button and then select the copy option. This extension displays a customized popup menu as soon as you select some text in a web page. You can toggle it on or off with a combination of shortcut keys.
*Version supported: 2.0 – 3.0b3

6. TabRenamizer
Sometimes you might be surfing some of 'such' sites which you don't want to show to others what you are watching/viewing. If someone comes to you while your are browsing those sites, you quickly switch to another tab. But the tab names will show what you are hiding. This extension helps you to randomly rename a tab to a very good and gentle name such as Google, iGoogle, Firefox,Wikipedia, Firefox Central etc. It has two options: either you can select to automatically rename all the tabs or you can rename each tab individually.
*Version supported: 2.0 – 3.0b3

5. Flash Killer
If you are not interested in watching those flashy Flash ads, this extension comes very handy. Some badly designed site and Flash content can crash your browser or can cover an entire page as you are browsing. With this extension you can quickly remove all the Flash contents of the current page with just a click. Right click on the page and select FlashKiller. If you want to view the Flash contents again you just can re-load the page.
*Version supported: 2.0 – 3.0b2

4. Netscape Link Pad
The official support for Netscape Navigator ended on 1st March 2008. We surely will miss one of the first web browsers but we won't miss its widely appreciated Link Pad side bar. Netscape Link Pad extension allows you to quickly add a link so that you can visit later. Just drag a link to the bar that's all. As soon as you visit the link, the link disappears from the side bar. This is very handy when you want to store some links to visit them later. Bookmarking links clutters your bookmark toolbar and you have to manually delete them one by one once you have visited those temporary links but with Netscape Link Pad you don't have to worry about cleaning those links.
*Version supported: 1.5 – 2.0.0

3. YouPlayer
As the site says, "A must-have addon for all video-site fans". This extension has a playlist similar to that of Winamp. Just add or drag the links of YouTube, Metacafe, GoogleVideo or any other flash video site to play them immediately, save them as a playlist or play them as and when you want them to play. It also has a search box which can search videos from You Tube
*Version supported: 1.5 – 3.0b3pre

2. Tree Style Tab
If you open a lot of tabs and find it difficulty in navigating those tabs and like to group the related tabs, this extension is very useful in organizing those cluttered tabs. It provides a tree-style tab bar and the new tabs opened from links within the current tab is automatically added to the tab. It has lot more features such and dragging and dropping the tabs to re-arrange them.
*Version supported: 1.5 – 3.0b3pre

1. Drag and Drop Zone Searching
How many times you find in a situation when you find a word and you like to search the word in a search engine of your choice? At this situation what you do is to simply copy the text, open a new bar, go to your favorite search engine and then paste it and then search. Whew! An alternative way is to drag the text to the Firefox's search box but too is very inconvenient. This extension is just for removing those inconvenience. For the first time I didn't know how to use it. When you select a text and start dragging it, transparent search boxes appear on your screen, simply drop the text and it shows you the result in a new tab. Searching couldn't be more convenient than this. When you start this extension for the first time, all your Firefox extension will be automatically added to the drop zones. You can add more search engines upto 64 search zones.
*Version supported: 2.0 – 3.0a1

*Version supported as on March 5th, 2008