Recommended Firefox extensions

I have the following confession: it's hard to write down paragraph-sized blog thoughts when it's so much easier to post word and sentence-sized thoughts via Twitter and Facebook. Pathetic but true.

Image via Wikipedia

Anyway, to buck the trend, I'm here to recommend a few extensions: three for folks who run Firefox on a few different machines (e.g., work, home, in a virtual machine) and one for the dwindling numbers who still blog (though also good for the increasing number of Gmail users).

First an aside about Firefox. I've definitely flirted with a few other browsers in the past 3 months (Safari, Chrome, and Opera) -- primarily for speed. The new Javascript engines in Chrome and Safari are super fast, and you can definitely tell in everyday browsing. But Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is pretty fast too and also offers the killer feature of supporting a wide variety of extensions. So until Chrome or Safari create a rich ecosystem of must-have extensions, I'll always have Firefox on my machine.

OK, onto the extension recommendations. First, for the nomadic Firefox users:

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) synchronizes bookmarks (and saved passwords, though I don't use that feature -- see below for why) across IE and Firefox. It mostly just works, though does insist on alphabetizing the contents of your Bookmark Bar which I found somewhat annoying. I use separate work and a home profiles to keep a separate set of bookmarks. For those into the teams behind the features, Xmarks was cofounded by Mitch Kapor, the guy who built Lotus 1-2-3 and was the founding Chair of Mozilla (the fine folks who build Firefox, Thunderbird and more).
• LastPass stores your username, passwords, and profiles (for filling out those pesky forms) "in the cloud" and features browser plug-ins for both Firefox and IE which will leap into action and offer to fill out your password when you hit a site that needs one. When I was on Windows, I used something called Roboform which did the same thing -- but Roboform didn't have a Mac version when I converted. So I gave LastPass a whirl, and it's generally the first plug-in I donwload after I install a fresh version of Firefox. (Try 1Password if you are addicted to Safari and don't need something that works across platforms and browsers.)
• FEBE does for Firefox extensions, themes and preferences what Lastpass does for passwords. It allows you to back them up and import them. Super handy if you find yourself installing Firefox on lots of different machines and dread the task of downloading all those extensions into your brand-new Firefox installations. It supports saving your stash-o-goodies on Box.net for storage in the cloud.

Image via Wikipedia

Finally, here's a recommendation for bloggers or Gmail'ers who want to create fancy email messages. Zemanta is a plugin that will automatically recommend tags, links, pictures, and other resources for your blog posts or email messages as you are typing them. Some might find this a little big brother-ish, but I find it super useful. It might even get me to blog more.

As I've been typing this entry, for example, it's offered to insert links for Mozilla, Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks, Opera, Xmarks, and more. In other words, I didn't have to insert the links manually.

It's also offered to insert a list of relevant tags on ths blog post (not as relevant to me, since this mostly just a personal blog).

And it's recommended a set of images to insert such as pictures of Mitch Kapor and Jon Stephenson von Tezchner, the cofounder of Opera, the Firefox and Opera and Foxmarks and Facebook logos), and so on. When you drag-and-drop them into your post, it automatically inserts the images as well as the reference links below the images. Genius!