Firefox has been indispensable to me for quite sometime now. First for its better security compared to Internet Explorer. When my friends’ computers where infected by viruses & trojans, mine was safe. Now it’s because of its add-ons (also called plugins or extensions by some).

My criteria for choosing a Firefox add-ons are :

• Stable : I’ve got rid of those which makes Firefox shaky
• Works cross-platform : I regularly work on Mac, Linux and Windows, and I want to have similar add-ons setup on them all
• As little as possible : I try to install only the ones that’s absolutely useful. More add-ons tend to make Firefox to become unstable. 3.x is much better though than 2.x in this regard. Some have reported to install over 100 add-ons with no ill effect. Anyway, I like to play it safe.

Here’s a list of the add-ons that I regularly use :

• AdBlock : Ad. Blocked.
• Firebug : THE Swiss-army add-on for web developers. It merges several add-ons, and then add some more functionalities on top of it, like, say, a Javascript Debugger. If you’re a web developer but hasn’t got this installed, you’re missing a LOT.
• HttpFox : enable you to mess around with the communications between browser & webserver. I’ve replaced Livehttpheaders with this, it’s much more robust compared to it.
• Tab Mix Plus : I like to open tens of tabs at the same time and do various advanced tabs operations. This is among the first plugin I put in everytime I do a fresh install of Firefox.
• ScribeFire : I like to blog (thank you Captain Obvious! ), and ScribeFire helps with this
• AdBlock Filterset : keep AdBlock’s list up to date easily
• ScreenGrab : Take screenshot of websites. Screengrab was chosen because it works on all platforms, not just Windows. Also for its simplicity.
• Flashblock : sometimes I connect to Internet via slow links, and I don’t like flash contents hogging it.
• ColorZilla : quickly find out the colors on a website. Very helpful for web developers
• ChatZilla : sometimes I need to do a quick chat on IRC, and chatzilla enable me to do so without leaving my browser.
• SwitchProxy : on slow links, I browse the Internet via compressed SSH tunnels. SwitchProxy makes this less painful.
• DownThemAll : THE download manager for Firefox, it works on all platforms (not just Windows), and with no external software required.
• Poster : make custom HTTP requests easily
• Gspace : use your Gmail account as online disk drive
• Scrapbook : Very useful, it will save current page into local copy on your hard disk AND help you manage it easily. I’ve benefited from it numerous times already.
• Kamus Pemeriksa Ejaan Indonesia : as it says

Here are some which I install on occasions, depending on the needs :

• Glubble : parental control for Firefox
• SeoQuake : probably the best SEO-related plugin out there
• Pencil : Sketching & GUI prototyping
• Table2Clipboard : converts tables in the web pages into the clipboard’s table format – ready to be pasted into Excel
• Cooliris (PicLens) : If you use a supported platform (Mac & Windows), try this ! Your flickr photostream will suddenly look VERY gorgeous.

This post also makes it easy for me to install my favorite add-ons whenever I do a fresh install of Firefox.

Anyway, what’s YOUR favorite Firefox plugin? Let us know !