In light of yesterday's entry about my failed Firefox Nightly experiment and the potential that some of my extensions are the root cause of my Firefox problems, I'm going to run down the current set of Firefox extensions that I use in my main browser (updating previous discussions from the Firefox 7 era, which alarmingly was less than a year ago). This time around I'm going to group them by purpose:

Safe browsing:

• NoScript to disable JavaScript for almost everything. I browse with JS blocked and only enable it selectively on sites when I have to (and almost always temporarily). I consider this more an issue of safety than of performance; I simply don't trust most JavaScript from most sites to not do things that will make me unhappy.

  (NoScript also takes care of blocking Flash, Java, and so on.)

• CookieSafe 3.0.5, with the actual addon here. I browse through a filtering proxy and it blocks ordinary cookies, but it can't do anything about cookies I get over HTTPS or via JavaScript. I use CookieSafe to block those (there's some more explanation here).

  (For me, CookieSafe 3.1a10 has an explosive interaction with NoScript that hangs Firefox in some sort of infinite JavaScript loop, so I am still on 3.0.5 aka the 2011-12-10 version of CookieSafe.)

User interface:

• All-in-One Gestures (specifically my tweaked version of it). I turn off A-i-O autoscroll because the native Firefox autoscroll is better (and has been for years). A-i-O hasn't been updated in ages but still seems to be the best, most reliable gesture extension in my brief experimentation.

  (FireGestures is actively developed but the last time I tried it there was an odd bug with changing font size settings; however, that was a while back. It would be my leading alternate here.)

  Update: All-in-One Gestures seems to have been a major cause of my Firefox memory bloat problems. I've now replaced it with FireGestures; see this update. I can no longer recommend it.

• Status-4-Evar restores the old Firefox bottom status bar so that I can see the full display of link targets and have a useful page load status display.

Fixing annoying websites, especially Google's:

• GreaseMonkey combined with the Google Link Cleanup user script to remove Google's tracking links from search results. I hate these tracking links with a burning passion for two reasons; first, I have no interest in letting Google know what search results I've followed and second, Google's tracking links screw up my history so that I can't see which search results I've already read and which are new.

• Stylish combined with a number of mostly personally written styles to fix various website misdesigns. The most important is a version of this user style to disable the left option sidebar in Google searches (because I hate it and I use Google all the time). I also have Compact Google Reader in the Firefox instance I use with Google Reader, for similar reasons.

  (This entry and its comments have a bunch of discussion about ways to fix Google's layout issues.)

  I could probably replace my use of Stylish with more GreaseMonkey user scripts, but I started with Stylish and I prefer fixing things with CSS alterations than with JavaScript (even if the JavaScript just inserts CSS alterations). Certainly there seem to be plenty of 'fix Google stuff' GreaseMonkey user scripts, eg this one for Google Reader (which I have not tried).

Improving my life:

• It's All Text! handily deals with how browsers make bad editors. The more I have it available the more I use it (and the longer comments and so on I wind up leaving, because I can actually edit them sensibly; this may not be a plus, all things considered).

Modern versions of Firefox also give you a JavaScript based PDF viewer addon for free. I have not done much with this and in fact currently have it turned off.

Of these extensions, I consider NoScript, All-in-One Gestures, GreaseMonkey, and Stylish to be completely essential. I can sort of live without the others, so as an experiment I am trying that to see if it makes a difference in Firefox memory usage and the number of zombie compartments that build up. If I am serious about this, I probably should migrate away from Stylish to GreaseMonkey for everything on the grounds that the latter is probably more actively used and maintained and so any leaks it has are more likely to get fixed promptly.

(Unfortunately I suspect that A-i-O is a likely candidate to be a leaky extension, since it hasn't been updated in ages.)