If you love your Mac and you love using Firefox, here’s some great news for you. There are a number of useful Firefox extensions designed especially with Mac users in mind. These add-ons fix some of the little annoyances and try to make your life as a Mac Firefox user just a little easier.
Some Firefox add-ons for Mac lovers are used to link your Firefox experience to native Mac OS X functions, while others are for imitating your Mac experience when you’re stuck using a non-Mac machine. Most of these you probably wouldn’t think to look for unless you realised they existed, so we’re sharing them with you today.
1. Mac OS X Dictionary Lookup
You may already know that it’s possible to highlight a word in any native Mac application and right-click to look the word up in the Mac Dictionary. You may have also noticed that Firefox doesn’t do this. But not to worry, there’s a number of great extensions that will let you have a right-click dictionary look-up from Firefox.
Why would you want this? Well, if you’ve tricked out your Mac dictionary.app to use Wikipedia and all of your favourite languages, it can be extremely useful to have easy access to those definitions directly from Firefox.
Bonus Tip: If you’re playing with multiple languages on your Mac, you might also like to read this post on Mac shortcuts for accents, this post on Mac language management and use this unofficial Google Translate Firefox add-on.
2. Mac Shortcuts On Windows/Unix
If you love your Mac but occasionally get stuck using a different OS (like perhaps at work), you can use this Mac Shortcuts add-on to bring to life a few of your favourite shortcuts. For instance, CMD+Q for Quit and CMD+, for Preferences. Obviously, the CMD button will change to CTRL and it only works within Firefox, but don’t let that stop you giving it a go.
3. Context Menu Keys For Mac
Here’s a little add-on which reveals the access key for your right-click context menu items. You can see the access key revealed in parentheses () in the screenshot.
Why would you use this? Well, it could be handy for access on occasion. Also, if you were to create an iMacro or do some GUI Applescripting involving Firefox, you could invoke CTRL-Click to access the context menu, followed by the access key from the context menu.
4. PDF Plug-in For Firefox
Does it annoy you when Preview opens your PDFs while browsing? If it does, try the PDF plug-in for Firefox on Mac. This nifty extension makes sure your PDFs open from within Firefox. This extension officially makes PDFs less annoying for Mac users.
More Firefox Add-ons
If you need more to read, MakeUseOf has many more lists of excellent Firefox plug-ins you’ll probably like:
- 7 Useful Firefox Addons For Online Shoppers
- 3 Useful Firefox Add-ons To Help Save You Money
- 10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons
- 10+ Firefox Addons To Enhance Google Search
- 3 Firefox Add-Ons To Help You Blog More Easily
What are your favourite Firefox add-ons for Mac users? Let us know in the comments!
Image Source: ShutterStock
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except the pdf browser does not work with firefox 4 and probably never will
There’s also the GPDF extension which works for Firefox 4.0:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gpdf/
The PDF Plug-in for Firefox is currently unavailable for FireFox 4. A good substitute if you have a Gmail/Google Docs account is the gpdf plug-in
Thanks for sharing!
If you love your Mac but occasionally get stuck using a different OS (like perhaps at work), you can use this Mac Shortcuts add-on to bring to life a few of your favourite shortcuts.this point is great that even using another operating system we have mac shortcuts add on…..:)
Isn’t that a photo of a red panda rather than a fox? Just saying.
It is a red panda, but it’s cute and similar. :)