Is your Firefox installation too small and weedy? Are you fed up of surfing with a seven-stone Foxling? Do other, larger browsers kick sand in its face and steal its girl on a regular basis? Yes? Well, you’ve come to the right place; what follows is a step-by-step guide to bulking up your Firefox with some of the finest extensions around. Soon it’ll be ripped, shredded, and pummelling its former tormentors into bloody submission without a care in the world. Who’s the daddy now, eh?

• Adsense Notifier - Because you want to know when that sweet Adsense cash comes rolling in, right?
• All-in-One Gestures - A wave of the mouse and you can close a tab, view the page source, and do all sorts of fancy junk. It’s also the only Firefox extension I’m aware of which can be used to draw big spunky cocks all over the screen.
• BetterSearch - Spruces up the results from various search engines; adds links to cached versions of pages, pulls product info from Amazon, etc.
• Bloglines Toolkit - Amongst other things, gives you a notifier at the bottom of the Firefox window which displays a little red blob when you have unread posts in your Bloglines account. A little pointless if, like me, you’re permanently behind when it comes to keeping on top of your Bloglines subscriptions, but never mind.
• BugMeNot - Grabs user-submitted registration info from BugMeNot.com to bypass enforced registration at sites such as The New York Times. Very useful if you’re too lazy to spend 30 seconds setting up a free account — and hence an invaluable tool to me.
• Checky - Submits a page to any one of a plethora of online validation services to make sure various standards are met. Good for web developers or snitches.
• CustomizeGoogle - Like BetterSearch but dedicated to messing with Google. Makes Google Image searches point straight to the source image rather than the page in a frame, amongst other things.
• CuteMenus - Crystal SVG - Adds Crystal SVG-based icons to Firefox menus. A continuation of the original CuteMenus extension which has icons for many other extensions and would go well with a Crystal SVG theme.
• del.icio.us - Bulks up your browser in ways that mere bookmarklets can only dream of.
• DerBrowserTimer - The best Firefox extension you’ve never heard of. Seriously. Adds a clock to your Firefox window which can be used either as a standard alarm or as a countdown alarm (or you can even have it go off at regular intervals if you’re that way inclined). Perfect for the egg-boilers amongst you.
• Diggler - Adds a handy toolbar button to step up a directory, grab a cached copy from Google, etc. The menu can go a little haywire in newer versions of Firefox but otherwise it works pretty well.
• Download Manager Tweak - I can’t remember what the standard Firefox Download Manager looks like and I’m too lazy to disable this extension and restart the browser, but I’m 99% certain that this newer version must be an improvement.
• Enhanced History Manager - Spruces up the Firefox History Manager. Like the previous tweak, it’s probably far, far better than the original, I just can’t remember what’s different.
• Forecastfox - Adds a weather forecast indicator to the Firefox window. Invaluable for those who don’t like looking out of windows.
• FoxyTunes - Control your music player of choice from within Firefox. I never use it any more because I find it easier to have a Winamp window at all times for instant playlist manipulation but I keep it around just in case I have a burning need to change tracks from within Firefox.
• FxIF - Displays information embedded within JPEGs such as camera type, focus distance, etc. I will almost certainly never need to know this kind of thing but I keep it installed just in case I forget what camera I’ve got.
• Gmail Manager - A little Gmail notifier and logger-inner. Handles multiple accounts, which is great for those of you who’ve sent countless invitations to yourself so that if you ever have to take a screenshot of Gmail it’ll look like you’ve got loads of friends (although you’ll have to take the screenshot in the “Amazon invoice” section to disguise the fact that you actually don’t have any).
• Greasemonkey - An extension so handy that I’ve literally installed my first user script today, despite having had the extension installed for months and months. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll have amassed enough to write a blog post on increasing the size of your ‘Monkey.
• How’d I Get Here - Great for those with no short-term memory; it shows you which site linked to the page you’re at.
• IE Tab - Allows you to open Internet Explorer in a Firefox tab rather than, I dunno, opening Internet Explorer. Has a feature to switch from one rendering engine to another more-or-less on the fly, which saves valuable seconds copy and pasting the current URL.
• ImageShack right-click - Does pretty much what it says on the tin; adds a context menu option to upload an image to ImageShack. Again, saves valuable seconds copying and pasting.
• LiveLines - Lets you add auto-detected RSS feeds to your aggregator of choice by clicking the feed icon in the address box.
• MR Tech Local Install - The Daddy; if you’re going to install a load of extensions, make sure you install this one first and activate the handy option which disables the 2-second delay. It allows you to override the usual extension version checking which is great for those extensions which are no longer maintained, and it can even provide a list of installed extensions in any format you like; perfect if you want to rush off a Digg-whoring “Here’s a bunch of Firefox extensions I like” post, but who’d want to do that?
• Nuke Anything - Removes objects from web pages. Good for removing frame-stretching images from message boards, for example.
• OpenDownload - Allows you to directly open a file without having to save it first. I’m assuming Firefox doesn’t already do this otherwise I wouldn’t have downloaded it in the first place (but if that is the case then it seems like an odd omission).
• Paste and Go - Adds options to the address and search box context menus which will paste the clipboard contents then press Enter for you. Good for when your Enter key breaks, I suppose.
• PDF Download - Warns you if you’ve just opened a PDF file, allowing you to download it and open it in an external viewer rather than having Firefox seize up for half an hour while the appropriate plugin initialises.
• Popup ALT Attribute - You know how you can add text to describe an image using the alt tag? And you know how some browsers will display that text if you hover the mouse pointer over the image? Well apparently, this isn’t actually correct behaviour, so Firefox doesn’t do this; unfortunately, you could be missing out on hi-larious captions and the like due to Firefox’s goody-two-shoes attitude. This extension, while a little temperamental, will (usually) display the alt text when hovering over an image.
• QuickNote - Adds a notebook to Firefox. Um, good for environmentalists and other tree-conservation types, I suppose. Have I got many more extensions to go?
• Resizeable Textarea - Makes textboxes resizable. Not something you’d use on a daily basis but it’s good to have around for those odd times when you do need it.
• Reveal - Hit F2 and a bunch of thumbnails appear to remind you which tabs you have open.
• Show Image - Tries to reload an image that didn’t load properly. One of those rare instances where Internet Explorer had one up over Firefox — until this extension came about, anyway.
• SmartSearch - Highlight text then right-click it and you can select a search engine from the context menu.
• Stop-or-Reload Button - Consolidates the stop and reload buttons into one, which is a reload button when the page is stopped and a stop button when the page is loading. Handy for those cases where you’ve got one more icon to squeeze onto the Firefox toolbar but you don’t quite have enough room.
• Super DragAndGo - One of my Desert Island Extensions which I absolutely have to have installed at all costs. In this case, highlighted text can be “thrown” (by dragging and dropping it a short distance) to search for the text using the currently-selected search engine, or to open if it it’s a URL.
• Tab Mix Plus - Another Desert Island Extension. This one enhances the existing tabbed browsing functions in all sorts of ways; it basically consolidates a whole load of tab extensions into one but it does it very well.
• Tab Preview - Displays thumbnails of tabs when you hover over them. More cool than useful in my experience, but what the hell.
• TinyUrl Creator - Creates a TinyURL for the current page and copies it to the clipboard. Again, one those extensions which only exists to save you two or three mouse clicks, but I suppose it all counts if your clicking finger’s broken (and better to install them now than to suffer the agony of installing them with a broken clicking finger).
• Tippy - Adds favicon tooltips to the back and forward history buttons. I think. The website’s a bit vague and I can’t remember why I installed it any more.
• Viamatic foXpose - Another extension that opens up thumbnail views of all your tabs. You know, you can never have too many extensions that open up thumbnail views of all your tabs in my opinion.
• X-Ray - Displays certain HTML tags in the current page. Handy for seeing where tags are, I suppose. Not that I ever need to do that, but somtimes I like the voyeuristic thrill of peering at somebody’s tags (as opposed to the legs-akimbo pornography of viewing the page source).

And that’s your lot. If your Firefox install isn’t one of the biggest on the beach by the end of all that then I’ll eat my hat. I won’t really. That’s a lie. But I’ll laugh at you for having such a bloated Firefox installation. Then cry because mine’s just as bad. Then cry even more because I really need to get some fucking perspective instead of crying over how many Firefox extensions I have.

Hmm. I’ve embarrassed myself again. Ho-hum.