I was checking out an article about various keyboard shortcuts with KDE and I was blown away by a feature in Konqueror. When viewing a web page in Konqueror, holding down CTRL highlights every link on the page with a letter or number that you type in and hit enter to navigate without having to use a mouse. I don’t know how long I’ve wished for something like this. I hate having to use a mouse and especially with a laptop, it’s a really big bitch.

Unfortunately, I’m addicted to the various extensions that I depend on with Firefox and I just can’t switch over to Konqueror. So, I immediately started scouring through available Firefox extensions on mozilla.org and after a good long while (Mozilla’s extension organization sucks), I finally found the equivalent. NumberFox does the exact same thing. Using only numbers to tag links, the font is a little too small and there’s no options to change anything, but it does the job. On a web page, hitting ALT-w activates NumberFox for both Windows and Linux (APPLE-e on Mac) and you’re off, leaving that mouse in the dust. I find that some links and some pages do not respond to the extension&8212;links in Flash are obviously a no-go, but I find that it works in 95% of the pages I’ve tried so far.

Thees murneeng, vheele-a I ves perooseeng thruoogh edduns.muzeella.oorg und sloorpeeng doon cuffffee-a in bleery fug ierned frum steyeeng up vey tuu lete-a, I nuticed a Fureffux ixtenseeun celled Bork Bork Bork! vreettee by Unthuny Hooe-a thet elloos yuoo tu trunslete-a zee text ooff uny veb pege-a intu bork-speek, in oozeer vurds tu meke-a it reed leeke-a it ves vreettee by zee Svedeesh Cheff frum zee Mooppet Shoo feme-a.

Zee Svedeesh Cheff hefeeng beeeng my ell-time-a fefureete-a mooppet, I ves cumpelled tu instell it immedeeetely und seence-a zeen hefe-a beee borkeeng ell murneeng lung in geeddy deleeght. Thees ixtenseeun rooles. Bork Bork Bork!

Translation:

This morning, while I was perusing through addons.mozilla.org and slurping down coffee in bleary fog earned from staying up way too late, I noticed a Firefox extension called Bork Bork Bork! written by Anthony Howe that allows you to translate the text of any web page into bork-speak, in other words to make it read like it was written by the Swedish Chef from the Muppet show fame.

The Swedish Chef having being my all-time favorite muppet, I was compelled to install it immediately and since then have been borking all morning long in giddy delight. This extension rules.

The thing that I like the most about Firefox is the customization you can have through extensions and themes. There’s a lot of really great stuff out there that can really change the way you can interact with web pages. I try not to run too many plugins, although I have no real reason for feeling like I need to be conservative about it. Since listing your favorite plugins seems to be the thing to do and honestly, reading other people’s posts about their preferred plugins is the main way I find out about new ones I can’t live without, I figured I’d make a list of my own.

1. Spellbound: A simple and easy to use spell check plugin. I’ve played with other spell check plugins for WordPress and also back when I was using Movable Type and while all three work well, Spellbound took 3 minutes to install, runs locally and is usable with any text input form on any website. It rocks my world and is the sole reason this post is not full of misspellings.
2. Sage: A lightweight RSS aggregator. I’ve used RSS aggregators infrequently for a few years now and it’s only until recently, using Sage, that I’ve actually begun to rely on them. Sage operates out of the sidebar and uses a customizable style sheet to display the feeds. It works well.
3. Adblock: Perhaps the most awesome, shockingly powerful plugin to end all plugins. Adblock stops advertisements, both image and Flash. It works better than any of the closed source proprietary programs I’ve used in the past and had to pay for. Plus, since you can actively manage and train it, you can enjoy a certain giddy pleasure at discovering a new URL string or keyword to add to the blacklist. Adblock is the one plugin above all others that I consider essential to civilized browsing
4. Bookmarks Synchronizer: I use Firefox both at home as well as at work and I find it handy to be able to have access to my bookmarks wherever I go. This plugin will export your bookmarks to an encrypted xml file and upload to a web directory of your designation as well as download this file and synchronize it with your bookmarks, enabling to be able to maintain one organized list of links instead of having them spread out amongst more than one machine. While it’s true that other systems exist for manging links such as del.icio.us, which I use I use as well, but I still find this plugin very useful and considering the fact that del.icio.us is often down, it doesn’t hurt to be making your own backups.
5. SwitchProxy: If you occasionally need to use a proxy because you’re a student, connect to several different networks or are a bit on the paranoid side like I am, SwitchProxy manages any amount of proxy profiles for you and makes switching between them as simple a pushing a button on the bottom of the browser window.
6. Gmail Notifier: Simply a small icon, residing in the bottom right of your browser window that reports when you have received mail to the specified Gmail account. Handy.
7. PasswordMaker: A small, lightweight, free, open-source extension for Firefox and Mozilla which creates unique, secure passwords that are very easy to retrieve. Nothing is stored anywhere, anytime, so there’s nothing to be hacked, lost, or stolen. You designate a “master password”, one, single password you like and the URL of the website requiring a password. Through the magic of one-way hash algorithms, passwordmaker calculates a message digest, also known as a digital fingerprint, which can be used as your password for the website. The resulting fingerprint (password) does “not reveal anything about the input that was used to generate it.” In other words, if someone has one or more of your passwordmaker-generated passwords, it is computationally infeasible for him to derive your master password or to calculate your other passwords. It makes you feel a lot better about the fact that you are too brain damaged to remember more than one dumb-ass password.
8. X Paranoia: Puts a little icon that gives you one-click browser cookie/cache/history clearing convenience.
9. Go Up: Enables a keyboard shortcut as well as a button to enable you to navigate up a directory of any website, for those moments you might be feeling sneaky.
10. Image Zoom: Not like the really annoying default resize thing with Explorer, this plugin lets you manually resize and zoom images as you need. I use it daily for a for a variety of scenarios.
11. Web Developer Toolbar: This is one seriously handy toolbar. Edit CSS. Validate. Outline elements and display all kinds of information about the page you are working on.

While I use several other plugins on a regular basis, this list is what I would term as the most essential and the first things I add after a fresh Firefox install. Alone or as a team, they improve my web browsing experience immensely. Fuck Internet Explorer.