I’ve been using the Firefox web browser almost exclusively for a few years. Initially I found that I needed to have IE ready to launch in order to see the seemingly large number of sites that had created websites that wouldn’t display unless you had one of the browsers for which the site had been optimized. This is not the case today. Most of the websites that I visit have “seen the light.” Ok, so they might not be producing XHTML compliant code or css based design but things are certainly better than they once were.

Firefox has amazing potential to be whatever someone wants it to be through the use of plugins. I am a sucker for extensibility. I love taking a solid core and making it behave just the way that I want. I am still amazed, at times, that so many individuals will not only create applications to do a staggering array of things, but also offer them up to the whole world to use and, in the case of open source, modify.

I recently went on a plugin rampage in Firefox. I figured I’d share some of what I am now using. There are some social networking plugins. I can access most of what I need at any moment with just a few clicks or hot keys. What I can’t get right into Firefox I have found iGoogle widgets to suit my needs. Some of the plugins I’m using at the moment will be removed and others will be added, but here’s my current list of 31 plugins: generated by the Extension List Dumper plugin, actually…

• Adsense Notifier 0.9.6
  Displays your adsense earnings on the statusbar.
• AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox 6.9.88
  Allows the use of Roboform in Firefox.
• All-in-One Sidebar 0.7.4
  Sidebar control with award-winning user experience!
• ChatZilla 0.9.81
  A clean, easy to use and highly extensible Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.
• ColorZilla 1.0
  Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies
• Digg Sidebar 0.5.1
  Shows Digg stories in real time in firefox sidebar.
• DOM Inspector 1.8.1.12
  Inspects the structure and properties of a window and its contents.
• Download Statusbar 0.9.6.1
  View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar
• Dummy Lipsum 2.1.2
  Generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text.
• Email This! Bookmarklet Extension 2.1.4
  Email This! will send a recipient the link, title, and text of the webpage you are viewing.
• Extension List Dumper 1.12.0
  Dumps a list of the installed extensions.
• Facebook Toolbar 1.2
  Integrate your Facebook life into your browser
• Firebug 1.05
  Web Development Evolved
• FireShot 0.36
  Adds the ability to take a screenshot of the page, edit it and save, copy to clipboard, send to external editor or e-mail it.
• Gmail Manager 0.5.4
  Gmail accounts management and new mail notifications.
• GMarks 0.9.7.3
  Shows your Google Bookmarks in the sidebar.
• GoogCal 0.3
  Opens page to Google Calendar
• Google Browser Sync 1.3.20070523.
  Synchronize settings between browsers
• Google Notebook 1.0.0.19
  Allows notetaking while browsing
• Google Reader Notifier 0.45
  Google Reader Notifier
• Google Web Accelerator 1.0.93.116
  Speed up the web!
• iGoogle Sidebar 1.3.4
  View your IGoogle (Google Personalized Home page) modules in a sidebar
• NoScript 1.5.2
  Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site). This whitelist based pre-emptive blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with no loss of functionality… Experts will agree: Firefox is really safer with NoScript
• OneClick Installer for WordPress 1.0
  Allows you to install any WordPress theme or Plugin with an option in your context menu.
• ReloadEvery 3.0.0
  Reloads webpages every so many seconds or minutes
• Remember The Milk for Gmail 1.0.1
  Task management goodness.
• S3 Firefox Organizer(S3Fox) 0.4
  An user friendly interface to manage Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service)
• SEO For Firefox 2.5.10
  SEO information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results
• TwitterFox 1.5.3
  This extension lets you know twitter statuses.
• Web Developer 1.1.5
  Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
• Zotero 1.0.3
  The Next-Generation Research Tool

You may have noticed the frequency of the word Google in that list. I waver between seeing Google as “Big Brother” and as a really useful set of tools. I suspect they are a little of each.