How To Add 20 Best Features Of Other Browsers to Firefox
Firefox is a great browser and we all love it but you might have at some point however tried different browsers. I bet you had a feature or two that you really loved in them and wished one browser could have all you need.
Well as it stands today, with so many Firefox addons, almost anything is possible in Firefox. Here are some add-ons that add common features of various browsers that are not present in Firefox by default:
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is the one browser that really comes close to being the default browser on my computer. Extensions are possible but the API is limited. Once the extensions API opens up you can expect to see a slew of extensions for the Chrome browser as well.
Here are some Firefox addons that replicate the features found in Chrome:
- Locationbar2 – Adds Chrome-like domain highlighting and other interesting features to the Firefox address bar. It allows you to click on segments of the URL for navigation. The colors and text are customizable according to your liking.
- New Tab Jumpstart – Replaces Firefox’s default start page with a Chrome-like start page displaying thumbnails and recent history. Although the start page’s design has changed in the latest version of Chrome, jumpstart still offers you the start page from previous versions.
- Chromifox Extreme – If you like the looks of Google Chrome you should check out the Chromifox extreme theme. It’s as close as you would get to the Chrome look and feel. If the title bar irks you, you can try Chromin Frame. It didn’t work on my side when I was writing the article so you might want to keep that in mind.
- Download Statusbar – Chrome displays downloads at the bottom of the window whenever you start one. Download statusbar lets you do just that in Firefox. You can customize it with a host of options and appearance settings. It also features a mini mode, which you can use if you would want to save on screen real estate sometimes.
- App Tabs – Lets you pin selected tabs permanently to the tab bar. The tabs are locked and remain open across different browser sessions until you explicitly close them.
- Mozilla Prism – Lets you prism applications from Firefox. The applications can be opened using a shortcut just like any normal desktop applications and feature a minimum browser UI.
- Omnibar – Omnibar is a nice attempt (although it falls short) at replicating Chrome’s incredible address bar and what all you can do with it.
Firefox’s Newer Versions
Quite a lot is known about how upcoming Firefox releases will look like and what they will all feature. Here are some Firefox addons that let you enjoy those features in Firefox 3.5:
- Ctrl+Tab – Lets you switch and list tabs by using the Ctrl + Tab shortcut. So what’s new about that? Ctrl+Tab presents an Alt+Tab like UI, which lets you see thumbnails of all open tabs when you hit ctrl + tab.
- Tab Progress Bar – Displays a progress bar on top of each tab.
- Strata40 and Stratabuddy – These are more for the visual overhaul than functionality. Here is a glimpse of what Firefox looks like after installing Strata40 and Stratabuddy
Opera
- All in One Sidebar – Opera features a very functional sidebar. You can get a sidebar for Firefox using the excellent All in One Sidebar extension.
- FireGestures – There are many Firefox addons that add the ability to execute commands using gestures. FireGestures lets you do almost all of them. You can use mouse movement gestures, wheel gestures, rocker gestures and keypress gestures. An absolute must try if you love mouse gestures in Opera.
- ImgLikeOpera or ImgLikeOpera Reloaded – These add-ons give you greater control on how Firefox loads images. You can block images altogether, display cached images only or load all images. You can also selectively load images if you have turned them off for some reason.
- Smart Stop/Reload – I absolutely loved the idea of a single button that acts as stop and reload depending upon current browser activity. If a page is currently being loaded the button changes performance to the ’stop loading’ action, else it acts as a reload/refresh button.
- FireTorrent – Opera can act as a bittorrent client. If you want to add such capabilities to your Firefox install have a look at FireTorrent.
- Speed Dial – The name says it all. It replicates Opera’s speed dial which is shown on new tab pages. I personally prefer it over something like Newtab Jumpstart, mainly because of too much information that the latter presents. The add-on gives you access to the 9 most visited websites from the new tab page.
- Tab Preview – Gives you a thumbnail representation of the contents of any tab when you hover over it within the tab bar.
Internet Explorer
- Fireclip – Loosely replicates the Web Slices feature that is available in Internet Explorer 8. The addon lets you clip various parts of a web page and monitor them for change
- myFireFox – A theme that simulates the IE8 look and feel.
Safari
I must confess that I am not a big time Safari user so I am looking for your help on this. I had it on my computer for maybe an hour or so before I got sick of it. So based on that little meeting, here are a few suggestions:
- Fission – Takes the progress bar inside the address bar. You can customize the color or use your own images as the progress bar. Neat!
- Tabs Open Relative – This add-on makes new tabs open next to the currently selected tab, instead of opening it all the way to the right at the end of the tab list.
- FoxTab – Brings cool 3D effects to Firefox. It replaces the default tab switching action with something a lot more spectacular. Not only that, it offers you different layouts in which tabs are arranged when you summon FoxTab’s powers
You can of course mix and match all these. In fact many of them could have easily featured under more than one browser category. App Tabs and Fission could have been mentioned under upcoming Firefox features while tabs open relative could have been featured under Opera as well. The Firefox addons mostly play well with each other, themes can cause the occasional problems, in which case you can always switch back to the default theme, or start Firefox in safe mode.
Got some more suggestions? I am sure you do. There is always a little more when talking about Firefox addons. Share your recommendations in the comments.
(By) Varun Kashyap - Programmer, Blogger and Tech Enthusiast, who tweets @VarunKashyap and blogs about tips, tricks and latest on the web at TechCrazy Blog
I love extensions and Firefox, but if only it can emulate Chrome’s speed or Opera’s syncing to its mobile counterpart.
I agree, the features I like best about chrome are under the hood features that haven’t been implemented in Firefox or anywhere else. Tabs as independent processes and sandboxing the extensions and plugins. I still use firefox on occasion and it is a great browser, but I am now on default chrome (dev channel).
Firefox is still the best!
I love FireFox, however, it should be upgrade the speed
wow! another awesome post!
I only use firefox for web development, it’s way too slow for regular usage. For that I use good old Maxthon (2.1.5 because the newer versions suck). I don’t know if there’re add-ons that can do these things, but I use them all the time in Maxthon:
- I believe firegestures does this, while Maxthon does this out of the box since 2001, right-mouse button gestures that can be self created and assigned to a lot of functions.
- This is the most important reason to like Maxthon: just drag a link to any direction and release will open that link in a new tab. No more shift-clicking or ctrl-clicking, this is the way to go. I believe this add-on does about the same: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6639
- Ctrl + F in-page searching in Maxthon can be closed with Ctrl + F which is a much faster way of closing the bar for me than Esc. In addition scrolling will go to the next found result instead of scrolling the page. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14188
- Add bookmark here is another very handy function which lets you place a bookmark into a folder very easily. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3880
- When an embedded video (like Youtube) is played in the browser, Maxthon will offer to download it. In this case firefox actually has an add-on which is better than the standard Maxthon behaviour: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006
“This is the most important reason to like Maxthon: just drag a link to any direction and release will open that link in a new tab.”
Or, you know, you could just middle-click to open a link in a new tab. That way you won’t even have to move your mouse.
Dragging is faster, my finger is resting on the left mouse button, not on my scrollwheel, which isn’t that easy to click because it can also move to the left or right.
(Comments wont nest below this level)The thing I don’t like about Firefox is the time it takes to load on start up. Once it starts up it runs great. Chrome lacks a lot bells and whistles but has great speed. Firefox is still my favorite.
Thank you very much this will be very helpfull
anyone looking to “chromifiy” firefox further will want to install “Hide Menubar”
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4762
Cool. I’m gonna try some of these out.
This entire post is pointless. It should have been titled reasons not to use Firefox. Why would anyone want to waste time with a slow resource hog of a browser that requires they downloading and installation of numerous plugins just to give it basic functionality. No thank you, FireFox has always been epic fail, all this article did was point out reasons why.
Opera 4 life.
loooool It´s actually basic functionality that Opera doesn´t have (only the features of the Opera-related add-ons, but the rest??
BTW Firefox have it´s very own features, that non other browser currently have.
And the greatest part is that you can have the best features of each browser in only one. Can you do that with Opera?
Anyway nothing against Opera, I simply find Firefox better, though yeah if it would be faster it may be really the greatest browser, but on the other hand I have tons of bookmarks (like 9 Mb with the database optimized o.O) apart from my extensions so there´s no way I can have a fast browser the way I use it.
I’ve never Opera slowdown because I have a massive amount of bookmarks, and trust me it’s a lot. The more extensions you need to add to FF to give it basic needed functionality, the slower it performs. Just poor design. The fact that you need to install a plugin just to get a decent download manager in FF is reason enough to not waste my your time with it.
(Comments wont nest below this level)i want Paste and Go for firefox. the chrome add ons above didnt give me that. paste and go is fucking sweet.
What I really want is a better way to browse through my bookmarks on firefox. If I could browse my bookmarks the way I can browse my tabs with foxtab, I would be seriously psyched. Anyone seen anything like this?
Wow, some of these are really cool. I will be using a lot of these, thank you!
I still use IE regularly because it has two features that the other browsers either don’t have or haven’t fully implemented:
1) I work off of the bookmarks, organized by folder and sorted alphabetically. As I add bookmarks, I right-click the bookmark menu and select “Sort by Name,” which sorts the folders on top and the remaining link shortcuts below them. Firefox interfiles folders and shortcuts, which throws the system off. Last I saw, automatic sorting requires making entries in the config file, and even then, it still interfiles. Had similar experiences with Opera, Chrome, and Safari, can’t get them to work the same as I’m used to in IE.
2) In IE, if I save this web page, it automatically picks up the title field text and presents it as the file name. Since I usually save these files in date-source-filename format, that feature is a big help in saving with names that make it clear what’s in the document. Firefox and others do that with some web pages, but often just present the actual file name on the website (i.e., “The Invisible Man – The New York Times” saves as “06talk-seacrest.html” in Firefox.
If there are extensions on configs to get these features to work like on IE, I’ll give Firefox and the other browsers another try. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the one that sorts and saves like I want.
(1) is working on Firefox with no extensions (or maybe with one of the extensions i’m using)
only thing related to bookmarks is my set is Xmarks
and for (2) u can use:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/834
I haven’t tried it but it looks like what u want…
Shaham: Installed Xmarks and the File Title extensions, they both work. Xmarks replaced existing FF bookmarks with the ones from the server (already sync’d from IE) and retained the sort order from IE. Still no right-click to sort after new ones are added, but FF with the extensions works just about the same as IE now. Thanks.
(Comments wont nest below this level)cool. How do i get the tabs to be above the url bar as shown in the strata image?
The funny thing about half of the “chrome” addons we’re in existence long before Chrome came to be. The add-on, “Download Status bar” is probably even where Google got the idea for Chrome’s feature.
I want a program that is simple where i can open multi websites at the same time and see all of them at the same time with a small window that can be maximized. A transparency screen of all websites in which i can simply hit the refresh botton and be updated on all websites. hard to do right? well anything is possible get startedd!
Best I can come up with is http://www.googlegooglegooglegoogle.com
Doesn’t have separate address bars, but it’s Google; you can still find what you need.
thanks for this, some of these are useful!
I have great ideas for improving the internate if people are willing to pay me to build the next fortune 500 company hit my email up. i am the revolution!
The internate? Could you also improve Warren GMail?
Also to be noted WebChuncks adds too the Slices functionality to Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/8494
new addition of add-on very useful ! Retrieving favorite web sercices information using KwiClick Firefox Add-ons: KwiClick adds gives open a new dimension in web browsing. … http://bit.ly/4D60XO
I haven’t found it yet, but I’m hoping to find an extension that allows you to hit tab while typing an search engine into the address bar and then search from there instead of loading the page.
Firefox’s separate search bar worked a few years ago for me, but I think I’ll be sticking with Chrome until the next iteration of Firefox. Don’t get me wrong, FF is still thousands of times better than IE, but Chrome works for my needs.
if you had all those add-on firefox would use up half the resources on your computer
I have all those extensions added except the theme-extensions. I use personas as theme. And it uses about 5% CPU and 300 MiB Ram with 10 tabs open. Might be cause I use Ubuntu/Linux as operating system.
Under windows 7 Opera is using 178 MB of Ram with around 20 tabs open. FF is a major resource hog of a browser. No good reason to ever use it.
(Comments wont nest below this level)Nice article…
Thank you for sharing
Firefox are my default. All those extensions come to firefox first before chrome. The only one i can think of is All-In-One sidebar which Opera was first with.
The topic should be “Firefox extensions other browsers mimic”
it is nice that the browser has a add on for everybody, it is diverse, just like the population is
least you could do would be to give proper credit, locking a tab was an opera features before google chrome was released.
very useful addons… thanks for sharing these
Been using this addon for years…httpsaddons. mozilla. orgfrfirefoxaddon10902Older versionhttpsaddons. mozilla. orgfrfirefoxaddon207
One of them appears to just be an IE skin too.
This list is missing the absolute killer features of Chrome: speed and process separation. Firefox gets anything close to those, the difference will outweigh any extensions in Firefox or missing features in Chrome.
App Tabs and CTRLTab are pretty rad, the rest of it I can live without.
App Tabs and CTRLTab are pretty rad, the rest of it I can live without.
They left out the new tab page addon that mimicks IE8. There is no addon that can mimick the color coded tab groups and Accelarators.
well.. it’s like I knew!
App Tabs and CTRLTab are pretty rad, the rest of it I can live without.
nice share,,,thanks masnn
App Tabs and CTRLTab are pretty rad, the rest of it I can live without.
this article is ripped from another website.
seen it atleast 2 other places
myFireFox what the? Get the IE8 L&F for FireFox? Is anyone really wanting that experience?
Cool. I love the Strata-40… thanks!
XD whoa! what a post we have here. ^^
very nicely done. congratulations.
now… to install some addons! =P