7 FireFox Add-ons That We Use

by Ryan Smith May 27, 2009

I know everyone in their mother has a list of good FireFox add-ons but I would like to share the top 7 FireFox Add-ons that we use here at McKremie.com.  We deal with DNS issues, multiple websites, and other issues and these add-ons really save us tons of time.  We all have our favorites and these are in no particular order.  This list complements the social media tools that will make life easier, if you haven’t checked them out have a look.

1) ShowIP

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/590

Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, Netcraft. Additionally, you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.  This is very helpful for anyone that works with DNS issues or SEO.  It is by far the most efficient way to get the websites IP address without having to run a look-up.

2) SEO ToolBar by SEO Book

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.  Includes information about Google PageRank, website age pulled from Archive.org, Yahoo! linkdomain information, number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us, Technorati information, Alexa Information, directory listings, and whois information. 

3) Domain Details

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2166

This one overlaps with a few of the others but has some great functions.  Displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports.

4) Screengrab

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame, basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.  This add-on will save you so much time if you don’t have it you are really missing out.  With this add-on you can grab screenshots or pictures within secounds.

5) Social Media for Firefox

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7888

Social Media for Firefox shows the number of Diggs, Reddit Votes, Stumble Thumbs and or Reviews, and Del.icio.us tags, Tweets, Sphinns, Mixx, and Tip’d votes so you can quickly see how popular certain content is. It can also scan said social sites to show you what content hasn’t been submitted to other social news sites so you can be the first to add it.  This can be a great tool and help you save time on Digg and Reddit.

6) Update Scanner

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362

Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds. This tool is great for following competitors and catching when a website changes their homepage.
You can select how often each site will be scanned and minor changes can be ignored, like date, time and whatnot.

7) User Agent Switcher

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.  View the current page as in a different browser (IE, Opera, Netscape). This comes in handy when you want to check for Cross Browser Compatibility issues.

Ryan Smith
Ryan Smith was the former Director of Operations for McKremie.

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