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Oh yes, I did just go there. Hands-down, without a skerrick of doubt, AutoCopy is the best Firefox extension. It may also be the best Firefox extension you've never heard of. Here's what it does, and then I'll tell you what makes it so great.
The top image shows text being highlighted, while the bottom displays the AutoCopy copying options box that pops up immediately afterward.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Developed at Mozilla, AutoCopy is a lightweight, single-feature add-on that copies any text you highlight to your clipboard. No more hitting CTRL+C, or using the context menu. That in and of itself is not so revolutionary. The feature has been around for a while in other programs. What makes it the must-have extension is that there's practically no other reason to highlight text on a Web page except to copy it to your clipboard.
Sure, highlighting can be used to reveal hidden words or perhaps make poorly-colored text stand out from a background, but those instances are few and far between. If they're not, you're spending too much time looking at badly designed sites. To do either of those when using AutoCopy, just hold down the CTRL key as you highlight and it won't copy it to the clipboard.
Once you've highlighted anything from a single letter to entire multipage New Yorker articles, the add-on opens a small options box where your cursor is. Through the extension options, you can configure how long that box appears for, or turn it off.
AutoCopy's add-on settings box offers a reasonable amount of configuration.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)If you choose to use it, the post-copy options box offers a couple of useful choices. You can undo the copy, or access up to 10 previous clipboards and bring them back as the active clipboard. You can also paste to the location bar or the search bar, search from your default provider using the clipboard text as the search term, or open the text in a new tab. This doesn't use the "feeling lucky" search, so it only works for URLs or FTP sites. The last option copies the URL to the clipboard.
Options to configure add-on behavior include toggling a status bar icon for the add-on options, paste on middle click, deselecting after you highlight, toggling AutoCopy in text boxes, blinking to notify you when it copies, and copying plain text. That last one requires an additional extension, and I found it to be more than I needed.
Back in 2007, my colleague Peter Butler thought that Tab Mix Plus was the best Firefox extension, and I agree that it's still an excellent one. If you're using the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5, you can grab a beta of the updated Tab Mix Plus here. Tab Mix Plus isn't for everybody--as he says, not everyone needs to make all of their tabbed browsing dreams come true. Not everybody cares about in-page ad-blocking, either. Copying text, though, is something everybody does in-browser, and it'd be great to see this functionality eventually built into Firefox or one of the other top browsers.
This is one of the best Firefox extensions around and makes tabbed browsing even better than it already is. Tab Mix Plus can change the close button on each tab feature, control the rows of tabs when you exceed the width of the browser window, and almost everything else associated with tabs. Use your scrollwheel to browse tabs, or control tab switching via mouse gestures. You can specify where Web pages will open--in the background or the foreground, in a new tab or the current one--based on how they were created: by clicking a link, typing an address, or using the search bar.
You can duplicate a tab, protect it from closing, or merge tabs from several windows. We also like the option that prevents those annoying blank tabs when you download files. Another useful feature is a session manager that restores tabs that were open the last time the browser shut down. We'd like to see an option to view tabs as thumbnails, but nevertheless there's something here for every Firefox user--don't browse without it.
Session Manager provides a toolbar button for easy old session access.
(Credit: Michael Kraft/Session Manager)Here at CNET Download.com central, we love Tab Mix Plus. It's so close to perfect, but the one thing it lacks is a decent method for restoring lost multi-tab sessions. Crashes can often lead to important tabs being irrevocably lost. Lucky for us all there's the Session Manager plug-in, a stand-alone extension that, when used with Tab Mix Plus, bestows the power of resurrecting dead multi-tab sessions to all us hapless tab abusers.
The easiest way to run Session Manager with Tab Mix Plus is to disable TMP's session recovery. It can only save two sessions, and lacks the customization specifics of Session Manager. SM comes with the option of loading the last saved session, not loading a previous session, loading a specific older session, or asking for the user to choose. Already, that makes it more powerful than the TMP or Firefox managers.
In addition, it can save any number of older sessions, configurable from the main window, and gives users several options for session management when Firefox is shutdown. The plug-in automatically backs up sessions in the even of a crash. Users can also configure how the add-on displays the list of saved sessions, merge new and old sessions on recovery, and reload tabs on recovery.
Session Manager provides extensive options control.
(Credit: Michael Kraft/Session Manager)Users who don't want to use Tab Mix Plus but like Session Manager also get the ability to restore closed tabs from Session Manager, and can configure how many closed tabs the plug-in can remember. As with the session lists, the behavior of the closed tabs list is configurable. Personally, I don't use it because I like the TMP one, but it's good to know that there's an alternative if I ever get obsessive about my closed tabs.
Finally, there are some nifty options for power users in Session Manager. You can configure how the sessions are named, change the default saved sessions location, encrypt saved session data, and configure how postdata gets saved, even from encrypted Web sites.
Since each session file created by Firefox includes text data, cookies, and history, as well as tabs, so being able to recreate all that information effortlessly is a major headache remover that shouldn't be underestimated.
In the spirit of my recently sworn allegiance to the powerhouse add-on Tab Mix Plus as the "best Firefox extension ever," I've created a resource guide for all of the features and options available in the Firefox add-on.
In a nutshell, Tab Mix Plus lets you customize nearly every detail of the appearance and behavior of your tabs without having to get into any of the about:config settings in Mozilla Firefox.
One important note: my Tab Mix Plus guide is based on the default Firefox theme. If you use a different theme, some of the Tab Mix Plus options may be affected. Also, this guide was written using Tab Mix Plus 0.3.6, which is important to note because the add-on does update semi-frequently. ... Read more
Nearly every time I meet with a representative from one of the Web browsers, the questions of "Which browser do you use?" and "Why?" inevitably come up. The answer to the first is still Mozilla Firefox, like most people I know. The short answer to the second is "extensions," which is an easier way of saying "more functionality and personal customization."
The follow-up question is invariably, "What's your favorite extension?" and that's much harder, because it's not any one particular extension that makes Firefox great--it's the ability to mix and match the add-ons that you want to use, tweak the options for each particular extension, and create a final browser that works exactly the way you want. If there's no add-on for the feature you want, you can always build your own.
Pressed for a response, however, I generally answer Tab Mix Plus. And when I think about it, it's true. I'll admit I can't imagine Firefox without AdBlock Plus, and the only toolbar I use is Web Developer, which is completely awesome. Some users swear by FoxyTunes, and it's the most popular extension on CNET Download.com, but I have no problem switching applications to control music playback.
It's true; the only extension I couldn't live without is Tab Mix Plus. It slices, it dices, it makes all of my tabbed browsing dreams come true.
What's really the best Firefox extension ever? Tell me about your favorite in the comments.
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