One of the cool things about firefox is just how much you can personalize it with extensions and themes. Today I am going to show you some of the extensions that I recommend. I have even found myself adding some of them in computer labs when I’m only going to be there for an hour or so.

Navigation wise I really like Gestures. There are a couple different extensions that will do this feature, and for the most part they seem to all work the same. Basically you can right click and draw a few lines in order to navigate. If you haven’t used them before, I would highly recommend it. Even with a few simple commands, life becomes so much easier. If you are only going to add one feature from my list, make it gestures.

The next tool that I like is the Gmail Manager. This will let you log into mulitple gmail accounts and keep an eye on them for you. It will show you the number of emails in the in-box, notify you of new mail, and all the things that will distract you and keep you from being productive. There is also another add-on called the Gmail Notifier, but that can only handle one account, and doesn’t show you the message clips, you have to actually log in to see your email. I recommend the gmail manager. If you don’t have a Gmail account, I recommend that too!

The Next one is called Search Status. This finds out the site’s Google Page Rank, as well as the current Alexa rank for the domain. Then it gives you tools to investigate further, and easily determine who’s site it is, and how long they have had it. From these you can help to gauge the credibility any given site. But of course, they are not the end all be all.

Sometimes when you need to upload a single small little file onto your server, opening up an ftp client is a little overkill. Well, at least when you have fireftp set up it is. With this little extension you have the connection waiting for you a tab away.

Next is Web Developer, I bet you can never guess what that is used for! If you do web design it can help you figure out where the pictures are going, where the divs end, and what you need to do. I honestly don’t use it enough, but it really has some cool features that can help you out when you need them.

Fasterfox will let you tweak your connection and help you to optimize your settings. That way you can get firefox to run a little faster, cache sites a little better, and it gives you a cool logo as well!

Of course I should mention grease monkey because of the possibilities; however I haven’t found many scripts that I really like a whole lot. There are plenty of small scripts that you can add that will change page layouts and edit things a bit. There are some useful scripts over at userscripts.org

I was chatting with Daniel who runs Daily Blog Tips and he just let me know about Colorzilla. It’s really geared for web designers and developers. It basically gives you an eyedropper tool much like in Photoshop. You select a spot an it gives you the color code in RGB and Hexadecimal. No more taking screen-shots to figure out the colors!

He also mentioned Stumbleupon. I was going to leave this one out, because there are so many interesting things that you can find with it. Adding it might provide you with a muse, but most likely it will provide you with a million things to read that are NOT included in what society likes to call ‘productive’. If you have some time to kill, then it’s certainly worth checking out. It might be a good idea to make sure all of you work is done first!

There are nine cool plugins to try out with Firefox, of course these are just some of the many useful tools out there. What are your favorite, “can’t live without” extensions?