Gadgets and Gizmos World

FireFox without Add-ons is like steak without juice. You eat it dry
In this posting I’ll share you my favorite FireFox Add-ons that have help me (whether directly or indirectly) speed-up my browsing and save bandwidth.
Best for people with sluggish internet connection.

1. Flashblock
My internet connection is suck. At my place, I can only use 3G dial-up with a maximum of 7.46 KB/s download transfer rate. So I hate Flash object, no matter how “beautiful” or “amazing” it is. Especially if I just want to see the other contents. Here Flashblock is a godsend for me.
Basically it replaces Flash objects with a button that I can click only if I want to view ( = download) the objects. So begone flashy ads..! For a site that I visit frequently where I have no choice but to download the Flash object, I can put it into white list. Then every time I open the site, no Flash objects are blocked.
Flashblock currently blocks the following content types: Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Shockwave and Macromedia Authorware. A real superb time saving add-on! Number 1 in my list.

2. ImgLike Opera
Again, this is a real bandwidth saver for me. ImgLikeOpera allows load only the images that I want in Firefox browser.
Here are the features:
- placeholders for blocked images
- (re)load image from context menu
- forced expiration time (5 minutes - 3 months)
- policies for tabs
- filters
You can choose policies for each tab:
- don’t load images at all
- load cached images only
- load images for the originating Web site only
- load all images
Less unnecessary image = faster page load

3. ScrapBook
You arrive at a very interesting site; it’s about your idol, Morihei Uesiba Sensei’s biography. Unfortunately you don’t have time to read it at that time because you almost late for your Aikido class, and your sensei doesn’t like a tardy apprentice. Therefore you bookmark the site, darn sure that you’ll read it later at night. After the class and after every-other-thing else you enthusiastically open your previously bookmarked site, then… alas! it’s gone. Apparently there’s a problem with the web server. So you have to wait indefinitely until the site goes online again. Right?
Wrong, if you have ScrapBook.
ScrapBook helps you to save web pages and easily manage collections. The features are:
- Save Web page
- Save snippet of Web page
- Save Web site
- Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks
- Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection
- Editing of the collected Web page
- Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes
It speed-up my browsing experience because I don’t have to wait for the page to finish loading. Just leave it to be downloaded in the background, and I move on to another page.

4. Tab Mix Plus
Tab Mix Plus has features such as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, and much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows. Still good even with FireFox v.2.
All the features here really help me effectively open page here and there.

5. FlashGot
Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page together with a single click, using the most popular, lightweight and reliable external download managers. It supported many download tool. FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality that helps to collect in single page serial movies and images scattered on several pages, for easy and fast “download all”.
Its resume download feature is really a bandwidth saver. No need to repeatedly trying to download the same file again and again only to collect some useless corrupted junks

6. QuickZoom
Adds two icons to the Firefox/Thunderbird status bar which enable quick access to the “Enlarge Text Size” (Ctrl++) and “Reduce Text Size” (Ctrl+-) menu commands. Right-clicking on either of the icons resets text size to “Normal Size” (Ctrl+0).
Easier page to read = speed reading

7. Download Embedded
Downloads all or selected embedded objects on a webpage. Use this for downloading movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, or other embedded files (note: this does NOT work on video embedded in flash such as youtube, google. video, etc.)
Find something useful and want to save it for later time? Here Download Embedded will come in handy.

For more useful Add-ons, please visit FireFox Add-ons page.