By Jason Parker and Peter Butler
(2/21/06)
In association with the Extend Firefox contest that Mozilla launched in December 2005, we picked our top 10 Firefox extensions at the time. Much has changed in two months, including an impressive batch of new extensions that came from the contest. Now that Mozilla has announced its 18 finalists, we're back with a second round of 10 Firefox add-ons simply too good to go unrecognized. Travel back to our December feature for our original 10 favorites, or visit the Firefox Extensions subcategory for a host of other tools.
Tab Mix Plus
There are a lot of Firefox extensions that customize tabs and a few good session savers, but none does both as well as this handy add-on. Edit everything possible about tab appearance and behavior, and also save Firefox sessions in case of a browser crash or unexpected shutdown.
All-In-One Sidebar
Taking a page from the excellent browser Opera, this extension makes your bookmarks, extensions, themes, downloads, and Web history all available from one handy sidebar. You even can view HTML source, a second Web page, or a built-in newsreader like Sage.
Gmail Space
Google's e-mail service Gmail upped the ante for Webmail with more than 2GB of storage for most users. Use your Gmail account to easily store files with this useful extension. An FTP-style interface lets you transfer local files directly to your Gmail account.
Grocery List Generator
More a standalone application that lives inside Firefox, this full-featured extension lets you add recipes and ingredients to a customizable database, then create grocery lists based on what's next for dinner. Save lists as Web pages, or print them out for your next shopping trip.
Reveal
Firefox Showcase is a strong competitor, but Reveal narrowly beat it out with its polished look and additional features. Simply hit F2 or Alt+~ to see thumbnail images for all open tabs for a window. Hitting the Insert key brings up thumbnails of the history for any tab or all of them, and the Back and Forward buttons also provide small thumbails of each link.
Sage
Instead of searching for stories, do you want the news delivered to you? Sage turns Firefox into an RSS feed aggregator that makes getting the latest news easy. Using the left sidebar, Sage displays your available feeds, lists your feed history, and then shows stories with summaries and images in the main window.
Separe
Those who use a lot of tabs when they browse the Web will love Separe. This simple add-on lets you keep tabs tidy by adding a separator to the tab bar. In addition to being able to divide up your sites into groups, you can click on the seperator to get a thumbnail of the pages in each tab so you can find what you need quickly.
SiteAdvisor
With the threat of spam, spyware, and pop-ups lurking around the Web these days, it's tough to know which sites have them and which don't. The folks from SiteAdvisor run tests regularly so you can see which sites to avoid before you go to them. You can even get a full security analysis of particular sites with a click of your mouse.
Adblock
Do you have a favorite Web site that takes a long time to load because of certain ads or images? With the Adblock extension, you can pick and choose which content elements of the page will load so your favorite site comes up quickly every time.
Download Statusbar
If you ever get annoyed when the Download Manager pops up during a download, Download Statusbar is for you. With this handy add-on, once you initiate a download, a small window opens up on the lower left of your status bar showing the progress of your
