OStatic

Everyone who uses Mozilla's Firefox browser knows that it gets much of its power from the thousands of useful extensions available for it. Some Firefox extensions are so powerful that they almost qualify as applications unto themselves, as I find to be true with the awesome iMacros extension. As announced on the Mozilla Add-Ons blog today, Mozilla has introduced Collections, which, among other things, will let you click one link to put a whole set of your favorite Firefox extensions on a new installation of the browser. You can find a video showing how Collections works here, and there are already several useful looking Collections available at the Add-ons for Firefox site (see the right side of the page).?

Here at OStatic, we've often covered the most useful extensions for Mozilla's Firefox browser. The extensions, of course, are what make it such a compelling browser to use. There has been a general trend among Firefox extensions toward extending the way the browser helps you get more out of the applications that you use all the time. In this post, you'll find six of the best examples of these app-helper extensions, which you can grab and install in minutes. Whether you use Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, applications on mobile devices, or popular development tools, you'll find top-notch, efficiency-boosting extensions here.

While Mozilla had been targeting today for the code freeze on the third beta of the much-improved Firefox 3.1 browser, it doesn't look like it will make that milestone. Meanwhile, though, there are quite a few updates from the company. Snowl, the company's experiment focused on delivering an in-browser messaging client for Firefox, is out in a new version, there are also updates on the excellent Firebug Firefox extension, add-ons for Firefox 3.1 and more.

If you're a Web developer, it's a pretty good bet that one of your most important tools is Firebug, an open-source debugger for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax that works inside of the open-source Firefox Web browser. Since it was first unveiled several years ago, Firebug has taken the Web-development world by storm, revolutionizing developers' ability to modify, test, and debug Web applications. In the last month, Firebug has received hosting and development assistance from Mozilla, a change that will almost certainly benefit both the software and the community.