Useful Firefox Security Extensions
Useful Firefox plugin list:
- Add n’ Edit Cookies This might be more of a web developer tool, but being able to view in detail the cookies that various sites set on your visits can be an eye-opening experience. This extension not only shows you all the details, but lets you modify them too. You’ll be surprised at how many web apps do foolish things like saving your password in the cookie.
- Dr. Web Anti-Virus Link Checker
This is an interesting idea — scanning files for viruses before
you download them. Basically, this extension adds an option to the link
context menu that allows you to pass the link to the Dr. Web AV
service. I haven’t rigorously tested this or anything, but it’s an
interesting concept that could be part of an effective multilayer
personal security model.
- FormFox
This extension doesn’t do a whole lot, but what it does is
important — showing a tooltip when you roll over a form submission
button of the form action URL. Extending this further to visually
differentiate submission buttons that submit to SSL URLs would be
really nice
- FlashBlock
Flash hasn’t been quite as popular an attack vector as Javascript,
but it still potentially could be a threat, and it’s often an
annoyance. This extension disables all embedded Flash elements by
default (score one for securing things by default), allowing
you to click to activate a particular one if you like. It lacks the
flexibility I’d like (things like whitelists would be very handy), and
doesn’t give you much (any?) info about the Flash element before you
run it, but it’s still a handy tool. - LiveHTTPHeaders & Header Monitor
LiveHTTPHeaders is an incredibly useful too for web developers,
displaying all of the header traffic between the client and server.
Header Monitor is basically an add-on for LiveHTTPHeaders that displays
a chosen header in Firefox’s status bar. They’re not really
specifically security tools, but they do offer a lot of info on what’s
really going on when you’re browsing, and an educated user is a safer
user. - JavaScript Option
This restores some of the granularity Firefox users used
to have over what Javascript can and cannot do. I’d like to see this
idea taken farther (see below), but it’s handy regardless. - NoScript
This extension is pretty smooth. Of all the addons for Firefox covered here, this is the
one to get. NoScript is a powerful javascript execution whitelisting
tool, allowing full user control over what domains allow scripts to
run. Notifications of blocked execution and the allowed domain
interface are nearly identical to the built-in Firefox popup blocker,
so users should find it comfortable to work with. NoScript can also
block Flash, Java, and “other plugins;” forbid bookmarklets block or allow the ping attribute of the tag; and attempt to rewrite links that execute javascript to go
to their intended donation without triggering the script code.The one thing I’d really like to see from this extension would be
more ganularity over what the Javascript engine can access. Now it’s
only “on” or “off,” but being able to disable things like cookie access
would eliminate a lot of potential security issues while still letting
JS power rich web app interfaces. Also read Pascal Meunier’s take on NoScript. - QuickJava
Places handy little buttons in the status bar that let you quickly
enable or disable Java or Javascript support. Note that this will not work with the latest stable Firefox (1.5.0.1). Hopefully a new version will be available soon. - ShowIP
This is another tool that isn’t aimed at security per se,
but offers a lot of useful information. ShowIP drops the IP address of
the current site in your status bar. Clicking on it brings up a menu of
lookup options for the IP, like whois and DNS info. You can add
additional web lookups if you like, as well as passing the IP to a
local program. Handy stuff.
- SpoofStick
The idea with this extension is to make it easier to catch
spoofing attempts by displaying a very large, brightly colored “You’re
on ” in the toolbar. For folks who know what they’re doing this isn’t
wildly useful, but it could be just the ticket for less savvy users. It
requires a bit too much setup for them, though, and in the end I think
this is something the browser itself should be handling.
- Tamper Data
Much like LiveHTTPHeaders, Tamper Data is a very useful
extension for web devs that lets the user view HTTP headers and POST
data passed between the client and server. In addition, Tamper Data
makes it easy for the user to alter the data being sent to the server,
which is enormously useful for doing security testing against web apps.
I also like how the data is presented in TD a bit better than
LiveHTTPHeaders: it’s easier to see at a glance all of the traffic and
get an overall feel of what’s going on, but you can still drill down
and get as much detail as you like. - All-in-One Gestures
- merges the popular following extensions for management of mouse
gestures, scrolling and power navigation. (Mix of Mouse Gestures,
Rocker navigation, Tab scroller, History scroller, Link tooltip and
Autoscrolling extensions) - Tabbrowser Preferences
- a comprehensive UI for changing a number of the hidden tabbed
browsing preferences in Firefox. It also provides the ability to
control how internal and external links are opened in the browser and
how the browser will react when links are sent to it. - Tab Mix Plus – More tweaks
added to tabs. Ability to select and open muliple links in tabs, open
link in a duplicated tab, merge tabs and close tabs from similar domain… - Duplicate Tab – allows you to clone a tab with its history and place the duplicate tab in a new window or in the current window.
- Colorful Tabs
- Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to
distinguish while beautifying the overall appeal of the interface. - Viamatic foXpose – Click on the icon in the status bar to view all the browser windows with a single click.
- Firefox Showcase – easily locate and select any open browser window in Firefox.
- Separe – Helps you keeping tabs tidy by introducing a new kind of tab.
- Permatabs – turn tabs of your choice into permanent tabs that can’t be closed, and stick around between sessions.
- FaviconizeTab – resizes the width of the tab to display the favicon only (and back again).
- Linky – Lets you open or download all or selected links, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows.
- WebMailCompose – Makes mailto: links load your webmail’s compose page and adds a Compose link to the context menu.
- Linkification – Allows Firefox (0.9+) to view plain-text URLs and e-mail addresses as actual links
- IE Tab – can open the
current page or a selected link embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of
Mozilla/Firefox. Very useful for those IE only pages. - FirefoxView
- Open Firefox with the current page or a selected link displayed in
Internet Explorer. Adds “View in Firefox” menu items to the content and
link context menus. - Paste and Go – lets you
paste an URL from the clipboard into the address bar and load it as a
single step, either via the adress bar’s context menu or by pressing
Ctrl-Shift-V - ErrorZilla
- changes the default 404 error page with following choices: a google
cache, an archival snapshot from the wayback machine, a ping, a trace
route, and a whois lookup. - FlashGot – handles single and massive downloads with several external Download Managers.
- PDF Download – Every
time you click on a link, checks if the target is a pdf file and in
this case let you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside a
new tab, download it to the filesystem or view it as HTML). - ScrapBook – helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections.
- DownThemAll! – adds
new advanced downloading capabilities to your browser. It lets you
download in just one click all the links or images contained in a
webpage or refine your preferences using fully customizable filters. - TargetAlert -
provides visual cues for the destinations of hyperlinks. If a hyperlink
points to a something that is not a web page (in cases of pdf, doc, zip
files etc.), then TargetAlert will try to append an icon to the
hyperlink that represents its destination - Download Manager Tweak – modifies the default appearance of the firefox download manager and allows it to be opened in a separate window, the sidebar, or a tab.
- Download Statusbar – is a browser extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away statusbar
- Disable Targets For Downloads – Prevents sites spawning blank windows when clicking binary downloads.
- FireFTP – is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers
- GreaseMonkey – Install user scripts and change the behavior of any web page
- Image Zoom -
Right click on an image and select a zoom option from the popup menu,
or, hold down the right mouse button in combination with the mouse
wheel to zoom in or out on an image. - Fasterfox – Speed up Firefox. Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with Fasterfox’s unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing. Also tweaks many network and rendering settings.
- SpellBound -
enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea / input
elements (html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound)
and rich text form elements. This allows you to spell check forms before submitting them. - BugMeNot
- Bypasses compulsory web registration using the BugMeNot without the
hassle of surfing to it and querying its database everytime. - AutoCopy – Select text on any web page and it will be automatically copied to the clipboard. Middle click to Paste.
- Copy Plain Text
- Copies text without formatting. Have you ever copied something and
been annoyed that the text formatting (bold, font size, etc) came with
it? Don’t you wish you could just copy the text itself, without having
to copy it, paste it into notepad, then copy it again? - Google Images Re-Linker
- This will let you click the thumbnail images on images.google.com,
skip the referred framed page, and jump straight to the full-size image. - Stop-or-Reload Button – Makes the Stop and Reload button behave like a single one (as in Safari).
- Extended Statusbar
- adds an Opera-like statusbar for Firefox that shows number of loaded
images, bytes downloaded, average download speed, load time and
percentage of the page loaded. - Resizeable Textarea – Resize small textareas in forums to your needed size avoiding scrolling.
- Adblock Plus – is an enhanced version of Adblock. Block ads, applets, flash, embedded-media etc.
- Flashblock – blocks all Flash content from loading on a webpage.
- Sage – add a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator which integrates with Firefox’s bookmark storage and Live Bookmarks.
- Cacheout!- lets you try to access articles on servers affected by the Digg Effect /Slashdot Effect through Google’s caching service and CoralCDN.org.
- Pearl Crescent Page Saver – capture screenshots and save full webpages as images easily.
- Reload Every – adds an
option to the context menu to reload the web page you are viewing every
so many seconds or minutes. Useful if you keep refreshing some pages
often. - Copy URL+ – copy to
the clipboard the current document’s address along with additional
information such as the document’s title, the current selection or
both. Customize it to add your own menu entries. - InFormEnter – adds a
small, clickable icon next to every input field in a web form, from
where you can select the item to be inserted with your frequently used
information such as name, email, address and whatever else you want to
be available from the form menu. - All-in-One Sidebar – is a sidebar control, inspired by Opera that lets you quickly switch between sidebars, view dialog window such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source code or websites in the sidebar. Can be extensively customized.
- Text size toolbar – Adds buttons to increase or decrease text size or restore default size easily. Useful for those small unreadable font sizes.
- Reveal – allows you to see thumbnails of pages in your session history and quickly find the page you want.
- Mystickies – allows you to place sticky notes all over the web and organize them with tags.
- Clear Cache Button – Adds a clear cache toolbar button that cleans the cache in one click. Very handy for those who have use for it.
- gTranslate – translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. Uses the Google translation services.
- Xinha Here! – is a wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor that enables WYSIWYG editing in any textarea and text box on any website.
- Yoono – instantly suggests alternate sites and people who share the same interests while you are surfing.
- BlueOrganizer – It helps you personalize your web experience based on what you already like, helping you discover relevant new information and save time.
- SwitchProxy
- lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. You can also use it as an anonymizer to protect your computer from prying eyes. - NoScript – allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice. This whitelist based pre-emptive blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities with no loss of functionality
- Always Remember Password – Instructs web sites to always remember your password. Some sites like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and banking sites instruct the browser to never allow your password manager to retain your information.
- CookieCuller – Extended Cookie Manager to protect/unprotect selected cookies.
- Stealther – surf the web without leaving a trace in your local computer by *temporarily disabling history (and address bar), cookies, formFill, disk cache and sending of ReferrerHeader. Verify details of what exactly it can work for you.
- Google Toolbar for Firefox – Lets you search google and all its services easily. Also powered by Google Suggest (Get query suggestions as you type in the search box), SpellCheck, AutoFill, Pagerank of webpage, access to gmail, WordTranslator etc.
- CustomizeGoogle – enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).
- NextPlease! – allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to jump to next and previous links on search results pages, like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and many other sites.
- BetterSearch – enhances Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com, AllTheWeb, Dogpile.com, del.icio.us and Simpy.com bookmarks by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info etc.
- Answers – Press Alt (or Option on a Mac) and click any word to get a quick, relevant definition or explanation, drawn from a collection of over 100 reference titles.
- dsense Notifier – Displays your Adsense earnings on the statusbar.
- Forecastfox Enhanced
- Get international weather forecasts and display it in any toolbar or statusbar. Now with improved radar images and allows for pausing, restarting and setting the frequency of automatic updates. - DictionarySearch – Looks up a user selected word in an online dictionary you selected.
- Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various essential web developer tools.
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