Firefox Add-ons: 8 reasons why you should use Firefox [Tips]

Firefox has been my browser of choice for over five years and multiple OSes - Windows, Linux, and Mac, and at the forefront of many innovations - multiple tabs, Awesome bar, smart keywords... and a ton of freeware add-ons that ride on top of what is a free and open standards browser. Opera and Chrome seem to work well on netbooks, if it's speed you are after,  there are other reasons - stability, customisability, and recall, where Firefox still owns bones in the year 2010. Update: Firefox 3.6.4 now has Crash Protection that isolates third party plugins like Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight.

So here's a look at 8 Firefox add-ons that can help you:

View tabs across multiple rows

Tabs are stored in a linear fashion by default, making it harder to visually access more than a dozen tabs at once. Tab Mix Plus lets you add multiple rows to your Tab bar, among other things.

Flip through your tabs in 3D

Foxtab adds a nice 3D view of all the tabs present on the browser, which is the signature style of Safari - Foxtab is more flexible, with Row, Grid, Wall, Pageflow, and Stack options, support for mouse and trackpad gestures

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Save tabs, reduce memory usage

Firefox has always been a bit of a memory hog, but then so is every other browser when you have 50 tabs open, and you should be able to do that without feeling guilty when you have a dual core or quadcore PC with more than 2 gigs of RAM. If you don’t, try Too Many Tabs, it’s is an add-on that you can use to free up memory, it adds an additional row that can be used to organise tabs, you can divide it into (Work, Play, Research, Entertainment, Social), and release any of your tabs into these rows. Once you do it, it frees up the memory for that particular tab, hand helps reduce tab clutter in the browser, organise your own thoughts and workflow.

Ubiquity

Ubiquity is an experimental add-on that adds command line functionality to your browser: just hit Alt+Tab to summon it, and you can type commands to do a number of things, the grand idea is to interact with the web in natural language, this video does a better job of explaining:

Sync browsing history across PCs

This add-on syncs your bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history across multiple machines, so you can be on the same page when you are using Firefox on your office or home PC, desktop or laptop or netbook.

Pre-fetch or auto-fetch the next page..

This was advertised as feature on the Safari 5 browser (Safari Reader), Autopager works even better, automatically fetching the next page in a multi-page article or search result.. it works on most sites.

Manage your downloads

DownitAll!! a mass downloader for Firefox that lets you pause and resume large files, it also lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage,

and do a bit of R&D

This is a free tool from Yahoo for web developers, Yslow analyses a webpage and gives stats and suggestions to improve performance.