While the PC Plus team entirely appreciate that the unifying power of Microsoft Internet Explorer is a fine and dandy thing for breaking Internet standards, we will admit that we’ve all hopped on the Firefox bandwagon with all the keenness of sharpened slates. The major advantages of Mozilla’s baby are its customisability; there are more extensions than a Rastafarian barber shop, and most are either useful or intriguing. We’ve gone through as many as we could, and present a handful of our favourites. We would recommend you don’t install all of these at once, however. Most haven’t gone through Firefox compatibility testing so there will be bugs if you bite off too many.

Communicating over the web
Firefox doesn’t support many communication protocols; surprisingly it doesn’t have its own messenger client built-in, and no-one’s designed an extension that has that function. However, Jybe is available. The plug-in equivalent of a conference call, Jybe allows you to chat with your pals while browsing together. When one of you types in a new web address, or opens a bookmark, your pal webpage will also update.

Firefox does have an IRC channel client Chatzilla. This combines Internet Relay Chat with existing web standards like Javascript, HTML and CSS; so in other words, it’s user-friendly and easy to fiddle with.

For a slightly more traditional form of communication, you could do worse than using the Gmail notifier. This handy little plug-in stores your account details, tells you when you have new Gmail and doubles as a shortcut to your Gmail account. What? You don’t have Gmail? Well, until Google go properly commercial with it, Gmail is invite only – though with the six degrees of separation rule, you should be able to find someone you know who has it. If you’re really desperate, check out the PC Plus forums - someone on there is bound to have a spare invite. With 1GB of mail storage, it is really worth getting an account.

Yahoo has also now upped their email account to 1GB, so you wouldn’t lose out by getting one of their accounts. Once you have, the Yahoo Mail Notifier performs exactly as the Gmail notifier, sitting in your status bar and informing you when you’ve got mail. It’ll also login on start-up for you, if you so desire.

Finally, if you’re really interested in using wholly open source products, we suggest you give Thunderbird, Mozilla’s equivalent of Outlook, a try. This handles the email client portion of Mozilla, allowing you to access several email accounts at once, with passable junk mail filters and resilience to viruses, as well as reading RSS feeds and newsgroups. It is also eminently customisable, with hundreds of extensions, such as PGP keys or dictionaries, though we don’t have the space to go into those here.

Entertained by a foxy lady
Tired of using that longwinded [Alt]+[Tab] to change to your media player? Alex Sirota’s Foxytunes is a free extension that allows you to control your media player from inside Firefox. It supports many players, including WinAmp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Musicmatch, Media Player Classic and Real Player. It’s one of the most well-designed Firefox extensions, with all the functionality you expect from a media player; such as seek functions, current track info and multi-language support, but on top of that you can place it anywhere in your browser, reskin it and reconfigure all the shortcuts. It’s also got a wake up and sleep timer, in case you want to turn your PC into the world’s largest alarm clock.

Interestingly, there’s a plug-in for a plug-in here. ChattyTunes plugs into Chatzilla and allows you to control Foxytunes from your IRC chat, provided that you already have both extensions installed. You can either play tunes from the menu bar, or just type commands into the IRC conversation bar. If you type ‘/np’ into the conversation bar, it’ll share with the world what you’re currently playing.

Finally, Clav has made a couple of simple games to keep you entertained within the browser; Cards is a simple selection of card games, and Blockfall is a tetris-like game of perpetually descending blocks.

Finding factual information Information, information, information – you won’t get it! So you’re slumped in your chair, you want to know what the weather’s like outside, but no longer possess the physical power to reach for the curtain? ForecastFox can help. Simply install the extension, and it’ll pop-up a window asking for your location; click on the area code button, and search for the nearest city. It has a surprising depth of content. Once your area is established, it’ll tell you the current weather, and give you a forecast for the next two days, including temperature and windspeed. You can also set up an alternate location, in case you’re travelling. MapIt! takes any address you highlight and searches for it on several different map engines such as Maps.com, MapQuest and Yahoo! (though the excellent Google Maps, satellite pictures and European addresses weren’t yet supported at the time of going to press), giving you a street map and providing directions from your (stored) home address.

For the proper researcher out there, Clusty Toolbar searches various online resources (such as dictionaries and encylopedias), highlights documents and uses a special algorithim to cluster search results on textual and linguistic similarity, giving you very different results from Google. If that sounds a bit over the top, DictionarySearch offers simple user-defined dictionary searches. Finally, for the paper-and-paste obsessive, ScrapBook allows you to save whole pages to your hard drive, so Internet access isn’t always necessary.

Browsing optimisation
This is a key feature of Firefox, and there are extensions whose sole purpose is to make massively important, yet tiny tweaks. The most important is IEview. This adds a simple right-click menu command to open a page in Internet Explorer. Despite all Firefox’s greatness, several websites check your browser version, at one time including nefarious Microsoft sites (such as Windows Update), to make sure you’re using Internet Explorer; others simply won’t work. On the other hand Nuke Anything is a simple right-click menu that stops any object loading temporarily, which is very handy for navigating advert-heavy or just poorly constructed pages. A similar key aid (to any poor souls with no separate advert-blocker) is Adblock, which allows you to block ad pages and pop-ups. Tabbrowser Preferences also changes the way tabbed browsing performs, allowing you to move the tabs around, select them with mouseovers, and several other essential little tweaks.

Google is already built into Firefox; but to improve it further install GooglePreview . This adds a small snapshot of websites, Amazon products and stock charts to the Google search, to help you find the information you’re looking for. Add in Image Zoom and you can have a closer look at those images – very handy on Ebay. Finally, About This Site will give you a wealth of knowledge about the site you’re browsing, through a contextual right-click menu. It shows Alexa traffic information, Google and Yahoo related pages, the site’s location on several ranking charts like Technorati, a Whois query and hunting for older examples of the page in the Wayback archive.

Download optimisation
Often the bane of an honest file-downloader’s life, the dropped download can be extremely irritating, especially if you’re a member of the unfortunate minority who are still on dial-up. The simplest way to optimise your downloads is by using the Download Manager Tweak .This simply improves the look of Firefox’s built-in download manager, and lets it be displayed as a separate window, pane or tab. A similarly simple to use extension is Disable Targets For Downloads ( here). This simply removes the occasional blank intermediary windows that pop-up when you click on file download links. Of course, if you’ve already got legacy download managers on your PC, then FlashGot is one of the more inspired extensions. This simply acts as an interface between Firefox and whatever download manager you choose, from Getright to LeechGet and Mass Downloader (there’s more information on what it supports here) However, be careful to avoid FlashGet, which is a doppelganger download manager that contains spyware.

News of the world
The web does news better than any other medium; rather than relying on a team of trained journalists aggregating your daily information into a newspaper, the web can allow you to tailor what news you read, by hopping from site to site. Moreover, with the miracle of RSS feeds, you can accurately filter all the news you want to read into your own custom page. However, RSS feeds can be tricky to set-up, and not all interfaces are the best for reading it. Mozilla’s email client Thunderbird (mentioned earlier) does handle RSS feeds but is a separate, bulky, download just for RSS reading.

InfoRSS is a popular plug-in to Firefox. Sitting in the status bar at the bottom of the window and feeding from any number of sites, it keeps you up to date with the news that you would actually care about. However, despite its immense customisability, it doesn’t create a pleasant viewing experience and can be complicated to set-up. Sage is, in contrast, better and lightweight, offering the RSS toolbar on the left of the screen, and letting you visit sites that have been updated individually. Overall, though, the difference between these two is essentially based on taste.

Far better still, Bloglines offers a web-interface for RSS feeds, which is both readable and intuitive. It even provides a separate piece of code that you can integrate into your own web pages, a desktop update notifier (that pings the server when you’re online to see if anyone’s posted) and will accept all types of RSS and Atom feeds. Moreover, Livelines adds RSS feeds to Bloglines or Sage with the RSS icon on the status bar.

Bookmarking tools
Of course, the real web wizard will be using del.icio.us the social bookmarks manager. This maintains your bookmarks on a website, so that wherever you go in the real world you’ve got access to your eternal, immutable collection of favourite places. You can share these bookmarks with others, add them from anywhere and easily access them from inside Firefox. For even quicker bookmarking, go to the website and sign-up, then download the Foxylicious extension. This adds daily, automatic updates and sub-categorisation that is folder-based. Alternatively, as there can be problems with Foxylicious, simply go to the del.icio.us website itself, log-in, and add the ‘post to del.icio.us’ Bookmarklet to your links bar in Firefox.

The final feast for the information-starved is StumbleUpon. This fantastic little widget sits in your toolbar, and let’s you surf the best-reviewed sites on the net. If, unlike the Lord Chancellor’s department, you have any faith in peer review then you’ll jump at this opportunity. It compares how you rate the pages you see with your peers and starts learning to only send you sites that others like you select, whether it be through length, humour, information or whatever else you might be looking for in a new site. Of course, it relies on you taking part, and suggesting sites for the collection as well.