If you haven’t yet made the jump to firefox, GO DOWNLOAD IT! Try it for a week, and you’ll be converted. The install file is only 7.1 megabytes. It has an extremely small system footprint, which uses much less RAM than IE. By comparison, Internet Explorer 8 is around a 60 MB download. One of my favorite features of Firefox is the ability to add plugins (small addons which perform specific functions like viewing special graphic formats or playing multimedia files). Here is a quick list of some of plugins I find most useful.

Greasemonkey – “Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.”

This addon really deserves its own category. With Greasemonkey you add your whatever funcionality you want through scripts downloaded from their site. You can change the way Gmail looks, remove ads from Facebook and Youtube, or you can download apple movie trailers with a link placed next to the movie. Whatever you want to do, there is probably a script to do it. You can search the different scripts at their website.

Adblock Plus – Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Adblock Plus will scan a page as it downloads and block the download of any banner of section. If it misses one, just right click on it, and tell Adblock to stop it next time you go the site. I’ve tried numerous adblockers in my day, and this one is by far the best.

Video Download Helper – “The easy way to download and convert Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites.”

Gmail Notifier – This handy little plugin has a little popup anytime you have messages in your Gmail inbox. For those email addicts, this is a must-have.

So, these are the plugins I’ve found to be handy. If you’d like to add to my list, make sure and let me know in the comments!