The thing that makes Firefox such a brilliant piece of software (and even a memory hog at times) is the abundance of extensions available to users. You can literally extend it to perform a bunch of tasks that are not expected from a browser. They also help improve usability, increase productivity and also provide security. Here’s a look at what we think are the must have extensions for Firefox from an average user perspective (that means you won’t see Firebug on this list even though we think it’s amongst the top 5 extensions for Firefox). On with the list then,

1. Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is an extremely popular extension. Most of you know about Internet advertising and the abundance of ads on some websites (see – even we have some ). A lot of these advertisements are mostly harmless, however, it’s a good idea to block the ads for many reasons. First is obviously for security. No matter how many times you tell people not to click ads that look suspicious (winning lottery, hot girls waiting for you, you are the millionth customer, etc), they still do it. Almost all such ads contain some security threat – phishing, malware, spyware, viruses. They are not safe. Another reason is if you have kids – even the supposedly safe sites these days can pop-up with X rated advertisements. Having a protection against them is very important.

This is where Adblock Plus comes in. Simply put it will remove all advertising content from web pages and will deliver only pure content to you. It’s the best no-nonsense extension out there. Because the pages no longer load ads, the browsing speed improves quite a lot – especially if you use slow connections. We strongly recommend this add-on to all users of Firefox. The extension can be downloaded and installed from here.

2. Video Download Helper

We are often faced with situations where we want to download embedded content from websites. You tube videos for instance. Many people don’t know how to download such content. There are some dedicated websites that convert the URL into direct download links but where most of those services work on one or two sites, video download helper works on many.  It sits near the address bar in Firefox and whenever it detects embedded media – audio, video and images, it gets activated and you can see 3 spinning balls. Clicking on that icon will list all the embedded media available on the page, which you can now download without having to go look for any other website that converts the links. You can find the download link and more details here.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a great tool if you have dried up on ideas. It’s a website where you can browse websites matching your interest. There are 500 topics to chose from and users like you tag the websites and pages with the topic. All you do is create an account, the toolbar (this add-on) has menus that you can use to chose a topic or a tag – click the stumble button and you’ll be browsing through the topics you chose. You can also browse through similar topics on the same website as well. It also gets better as you tag more websites and browse more. With over 25 million registered users and more than a billion stumbles per month, this is one of the best add-on for writers and researchers. It’s database it ever growing and is getting better every day. You can get it here.

4. Greasemonkey

Getting annoyed by the Facebook ticker that was added recently? Use Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to use scripts that allow on-the-fly changes to web pages. There are plenty of scripts available that you can use to make changes, there is no need to worry if you don’t know how to write the scripts. The best thing is, Greasemonkey remembers these changes and will execute them every time you load the page. It’s as if the website has changed – just for you. There are, as I said, a lot of user scripts available on userscripts.org. You can also roll out your own scripts, look at the wiki for information on how to do this and finally you can get the add-on here.

5. Feedly

Feedly is the overall best start-page add-on I have ever seen. Remember iGoogle? It tried to organize all your content on one page which you can put as your default start page for your browser. Feedly is similar to that but much better. Feedly is magazine-like start page based on the best content of your favorite websites. Powered by Google Reader and Twitter. When installed Feedly will present you with a starting page that has news from a variety of topics such as Android, Photography and World News. You can customize all of this, add sites you want to follow and also read your Google reader feeds right here. You can also log-in to your twitter and Facebook feeds to check them from Feedly. It also comes with a link to this article telling you 9 ways to personalize your Feedly page. You can download the add-on here.

12 Comments »

  1. Mike / Paula, I’m curious…were you able (or perhaps a better question–WOULD you have been able, had you not “reported a problem”) to get your own photos to supersede the ones that Google scraped? This seems to me to be the lesson for business owners AND for Google on this one:

    #1 Google (yes, readers, I know I’m shouting in the wilderness here) — Stop treating the Place Page as wholly YOUR content. One of the reasons so many business owners are more engaged with Facebook than they are with you is that (save for Wall comments from fans), they get to decide what shows up. I get that you want to get as many Places reviews as you can and shut out the Yelps of the world, that seems fair. Places reviews are basically equivalent to Wall comments. But stop hiding business owner descriptions, showing nearby places they WON’T like (aka competitors), overwriting their verified data with crap from third-party sources, and for goodness sakes, let them choose thumbnail images associated with their own business.

    #2 Business owners — Make sure you upload ALL available photos which you’re allotted to. Hopefully a “full shelf” of owner-submitted photos will prevent this in the future.

    Comment by David Mihm (147 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 10:11 am

  2. Thanks for this post, this will help a lot of businesses. I couldn’t agree more with David on both of his points. I could only add in my view that Google should add clarity to the process so, business owners can know in advance how to avoid these problems.

    Comment by Mark Knowles (1 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 10:49 am

  3. Already added the photos deal to best practices, but perhaps a stronger sentiment is required – nobody ever provides enough images. Thanks for the reporting. DEMAND photos from clients or else they could suffer the same fate!

    That would be disasterous for the health-related professional svcs…imagine this, you’re searching for a new dentist in town, click on a prominent Places page with numerous reviews, only to witness shock and awe in place of an engaging geotargeted environment.

    One sight of jacked up bloody teeth or gums, and its lights out for that dentist – with respect to the search/conversion…new patient.

    Consumer moves on, thinking the SMB actually OWNS or CONTROLS the Places listings…and goes away with the impression of how THEY (dental ofc) were stupid enough to make those photos public.

    As a whole, consumers generally think the business represented went ahead and uploaded the published photos, not Google by some contrivance of circumstance.

    Comment by Chris (57 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 11:02 am

  4. @David
    Your suggestion is a good one although I am not 100% sure that it will prevent this. I will ask around.

    @Mark
    Communicating clearly has not been Google’s hallmark but they do seem to be improving under the new management. In this case they would need to put an alert by the image upload that links to this post and says in bold “Upload 10 photos or this could happen to you”

    @Chris
    Photos are difficult to drag out of clients. At least three as a bare minimum as Google is prepared to give each business that much space for branded searches on the front page of Google. Even then I have a hard time getting them.

    Comment by Mike (2206 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 11:15 am

  5. Interesting article. I just checked our own cosmetic surgery Google Places listing, and it too has gone from G to X. In addition, Google has inappropriately selected images from our site that tell stories but aren’t representative of what we do… note the image of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay!

    Comment by Dr. C Bunks (2 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 11:49 am

  6. @Dr C
    Hmm… this problem may be more prevalent in your industry than I suspected.

    Thanks for the link.

    Comment by Mike (2206 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 11:53 am

  7. We did upload the max 10 images and pushed the nude images off the main Place Page view. We reported the images as inappropriate, and we see today those images removed from the main listing, but not all from the individual surgeons listings.

    Comment by Amy Arnold (2 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 12:08 pm

  8. When do bugs become swarms? I think that point is fast approaching

    BTW, for Dr. Bunks, I would point out that the only category on his page is hypnotherapist. I’m guessing that’s something that needs to be addressed as well.

    Comment by Keith E. McGahey (18 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 12:20 pm

  9. @David – We were able to make our own images push down the others. This is a newly claimed Place page and we had not yet added any of our own photos through the LBC, so once we did add them, they pushed all the auto-pulled ones off the first page of photos.

    Comment by Paula Keller (2 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 12:53 pm

  10. You may be interested to know that our Google Places account has been suspended. In addition, the places page that displays indicates that I can claim that business. I’m guessing that as my account is suspended, Google does the automated thing… extracting photos from my website, and inventing a profile.

    I’ve contacted the Google customer service center (for Adwords), and they have promised to look into it…

    Maybe more to follow.

    Comment by Dr. C Bunks (2 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 1:48 pm

  11. I have a similar problem with a client listing (a carpet cleaner). It keeps pulling a picture of a dog peeing on a rug. When you click the thumbnail to view the pic in full screen the full screen pic has a hyperlink to a competitor’s website.

    I click “inappropriate photo”, fill in the details, and the image vanishes for a month… but then it comes back.

    We have tried submitting a bunch of our own picks but this other one keeps showing back up. What is really annoying is it is tagged as “Submitted by Owner”.

    Comment by Mark (60 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 3:40 pm

  12. @Mark
    It could be caused by “cluster confusion” or possibly merging of the two clusters. For some reason the Google algo is confused.

    Comment by Mike (2206 comments) — October 21, 2011 @ 3:42 pm

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