I recent­ly updat­ed to Fire­fox 1.5 as read in my pre­vi­ous entry a cou­ple of days ago. Not to men­tion, I also post­ed about exten­sions that I think are a must-have for web developers/designers a month ago. With those in mind, I took some time this past week­end to do some house clean­ing.

With the hol­i­days steadi­ly truck­ing its way for the new year, one should keep their envi­ron­ment free. This also helps you out so you don’t catch a cold or flu, and be bed-rid­den when every­one is par­ty­ing it up. I know this is com­mon knowl­edge but peo­ple still forget—even me some­times. Take for exam­ple this past Sat­ur­day morn­ing while I was get­ting ready to play pick­up-soft­ball at Krusi Park.

I was on my way to my car when I just seem to for­get an essen­tial item, my shoes. I knew that I put it near the bar in the enter­tain­ment room area but I seem to not find it any­where. I recall that I just left it there last week­end. Then I remem­ber Big­gy’s mom clean­ing up and prob­a­bly grabbed it along with the oth­er shoes. To make a long sto­ry short, I found it lat­er but used my san­dals to go to the park and play. Les­son-learned, stay orga­nized as it might save you some time and ener­gy when you need it the most.

Mean­while, back to Fire­fox exten­sions. So I was clean­ing my room and stuff, and decid­ed to do some main­te­nance on my PC as well. Did the usu­al Ad-aware, Anti-virus and Defrag work­flow. Then, was enticed of upgrad­ing my brows­er to 1.5 there too but lat­er decid­ed that I should keep my home-PC at 1.0.7 at the moment.

I then tried to see which exten­sions have updates, which led me to go and learn more about new exten­sions. After an hour or two of opti­miz­ing which exten­sions to take out, add and update, here’s what I think are neces­si­ty:

• Web Devel­op­er
• Screen­grab
• HTML Val­ida­tor
• ShowIP
• View Ren­dered Source Chart
• Col­orZil­la
• IE Tab
• FireFTP
• gTrans­late
• Site­Bar Side­bar/Client
• Grease­mon­key
• Aut­ofill
• Aard­vark
• Fire­bug

I also have been using Tab­brows­er Exten­sion (TBE) but late­ly fig­ured out that I don’t need every­thing that comes with it. So I did some research and dis­cov­ered that there’s a cou­ple of exten­sions that can achieve the same func­tion­al­i­ty. Here they are:

• Tab­brows­er Pref­er­ences (TBP)
• Ses­sion Saver
• Tab X
• Last­Tab

I hope these exten­sions become use­ful to you as they were for me. They total­ly make the Fire­fox expe­ri­ence bet­ter; not to men­tion, the improve­ment of effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tion in my work­flow. I also noticed a low­er CPU usage when I took out TBE and installed the four exten­sions above (TBP, Ses­sion Saver, Tab X and Last­Tab) instead.

So, there you go… Keep things orga­nized. Keep things clean.

Note: Thanks goes out to Petr for updat­ing me with the Fire­fox Site­Bar exten­sion update (Site­Bar Client).