45 Interesting Firefox Addons we never knew Existed – I

So I took out time to go through the entire list of Firefox addons on the AMO site (there are about 3000 of them as of now). As per the title here are some addons with interesting functionality. They may not have hit the most-popular list or the most-downloaded list, nevertheless there’s something interesting about them be it the idea behind them, the functionality or just the story behind their creation. Here there are (alphabetically).

1. /Find Bar/: What’s in a name? Slashes; and that makes this figure at the top of our alphabetically sorted list. The slashes in the name are representative of the functionality of this addon which adds support for searching text on a page using regular expressions.
2. About:IceCream: What has icecream got to do with Firefox? I guess everyone needs a little ice cream. Once installed, your firefox will have a page at about:icecream to remind you how easy it is to make someone’s life a little better. It was the love, affection and attachment of a kid with Mozilla Firefox that materialized into an extension. (Backstory part 1, Backstory part 2).
3. Adsense Preview: Preview the Google ads that may show on any web page… Interesting? Well noticeable I’d say.
4. AnyColor: Change Firefox to Any Color and create your own personalized theme.
5. Attention Recorder: Everything we do online — what we browse, what feeds we read, what we search for — increasingly represents who we are. This “Attention Data” has real value and needs to be protected…
6. AutoBrowse: The most creative screensaver in the world. It will Google for a keyword that you input and then browse the sites in the result list one by one. You sit back and enjoy the internet.
7. Base64 Encoder: This guy lets you turn an image into base54 encoded text. You can embed this text into a website to turn it into an image.
8. Better GReader: Preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader. This addon is from Gina Trapani – the founding editor of Life Hacker.
9. Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures: Gmail web interface has lacked html signatures. Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail messages based on which address you are sending from. Supports up to four signatures for each address you have set up. Works for Compose Message and Reply/Forward.
10. Camifox: Elegant, crisp, and colorful Camifox is a thoughtful, sophisticated reimagination and realization of a better “default” theme for Firefox, in living color on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
11. cobrowse: This extension turns Firefox into a simple collaborative web browser. With cobrowse installed, one user starts a “server” that will accept incoming connections (currently fixed to port 5000) from folks that have chosen to connect via “client mode”. The server browser then sends every web page navigation change to every client. It even works when changing tabs! Good for showing people the way around the internet.
12. Confuscator!: Confuses your text message a tad, by randomizing the letters in the selected words, so that only the first and last letters are kept in place. There’s a scientific study behind it which basically proves that human eyes can read words with jumbled up letters correctly and perfectly fine as long as the first and the last letters are in place. Confused?
13. Edit Middle 2: Show AwesomeBar results when editing in the middle (not just at the end). This makes it easier to correct typos or change search terms and immediately see new results.
14. Event Spy: Event Spy adds a context menu item to nodes in DOM Inspector’s tree view that allows you to watch events that pass by the selected node. You never be left clueless about javascript events on Firefox DOM nodes.
15. FishEyeTabs: Turn your Tab-strip into a Mac OS X like magnifiable dock. Makes tab selection easier by replacing scrolling with fisheye – zooming when many tabs are open and they become too small. User can zoom tab labels by simply moving the mouse cursor over them.

That’s for part 1 of this post. Read the second part.