Add-ons are little programs (like apps for the cell phone) that work with other programs to make our computer using experience faster, easier and more pleasant. They can be anything from a toolbar that sits in the top of a browser, to a button that gives the local weather at the time. They’re almost always free, since they also do double duty as advertisements.
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is very popular, easy to use and it takes up little space. It is rather slow, compared to the others, but most of the web is optimized for it’s use. There are over 5,000 add-ons made to be used with Firefox, some of them very useful, some of them more fun than anything else.
This one, Invisible Hand, is to use when shopping. The hand will show the user a discreet message telling them where a better price is for the same item. Another add-on, Flagfox, shows the flag of the country a website’s server is in. Add-ons are handy, fun, and things that nobody needs, but everyone likes.
Take Part in Structured User Studies
Firefox even has an add-on that allows the user to take part in their customer research forums. Be a part of their structured user studies with this one. And PixlGrabber lets the user snag pictures from the web and pull them onto their desktop.
Blogging is very popular these days, and ScribeFire Blog Editor is so popular that nearly three million Firefox users have downloaded the add-on. It’s a full-featured blog editor that integrates with the browser and makes blog posting easy. They’re about to unleash ScribeFire Next, the new edition that’s better than the original.
“VLC context menu” is a useful add-on that allows you to add urls of audio and video files to VLC playlists via context menu of your browser. Make sure that you have VLC player to benefit from this add-on. If you don’t have VLC and are contented with your default media player then you can think about having Xvid which is a video codec library that allows you to play videos of different formats in your media player.
Yapta is an add-on that helps to plan travel and save users money by tracking airfares. It notifies the user if prices drop, making the user eligible for vouchers or refunds from the airlines.
FireFTP button is a simple tool bar button for FireFTP that allows you to connect to ftp servers through firefox, same as you get connected with FTP servers using filezilla.
“Ares P2P toolbar” for firefox allows you to get connected to your Ares network for easy access to files and digital media network.
“1-Click Online Document View” enables you to open and view word processing files, spreadsheets and PDF files created with Microsoft Office, Open Office, Acrobat etc in your firefox browser.
Don’t be afraid; scan everything downloaded and have fun trying new add-ons.