If you use Google services, you may have noticed that they recently yanked around the design of pretty much everything. Part of that work basically forced me to upgrade from a self-compiled Firefox 3.6.2x to a self-compiled Firefox 7, because Google carefully broke my workaround to their previous search design issue by degrading the HTML returned when you visited in Firefox 3.x from a <div>-based layout to a table based layout. Since I can't stand the stock Google search results layout, it was either switch search engines or update to Firefox 7 to get a fixable, <div>-based layout back. I opted to do the latter.

(It helped that since I upgraded to Fedora 15 at both home and work, my testing instance of Firefox has been Firefox 7 so I've already partly acclimatized to it. I might have been very grumpy with Google if I had been forced into Firefox 7 cold.)

I am not entirely fond of Firefox 7's interface, but I can live with it. However, now it's time to update my list of essential extensions from the Firefox 3 version:

• NoScript continues to be one of my two core extensions. It works. What more can I say?

  With the effective disappearance of the bottom status bar in Firefox 7, I now put the NoScript menu button in the top bar.

• All-in-One Gestures (or more specifically my tweaked version of it) is my second core extension. It too works fine. As is by now standard, I turn off A-i-O autoscroll in favour of native autoscroll.

  (I experimented with FireGestures at one point but at the time it had an odd bug where font size changes didn't persist and would revert back to the default sizes very easily. I can't remember if this was in Firefox 7 or Firefox 3.6.)

• Stylish continues to work and to be essential for suppressing horrible design decisions that sites I feel compelled to use keep trying to stuff down my throat.

• It's All Text is rapidly becoming essentially for any browser instance that I use a lot, because it handily deals with how browser make bad editors. Now that I actually run a current version of Firefox I can actually use it, unlike earlier.

• I had to switch to CookieMonster for suppressing cookies, because my old standby CookieSafe doesn't seem to work under Firefox 7. Since I just switched I don't know how well CookieMonster is going to work, but it seems acceptable so far.

  (See my original entry for an explanation of how I handle cookies in general.)

I no longer care about the Nightly Tester Tools extension. The relentless march of Firefox version numbers has created a situation where running the bleeding edge Firefox means doing without extensions relatively frequently, and I'm no longer willing to do that. At the moment I'm running a patched and self-compiled version of the current release version of Firefox 7 and I expect to continue doing so in the future; if anything I'm likely to lag behind the official releases (as I did recently, when I was still running Firefox 3.6.x well after Firefox went past that).

My list of extensions that I don't use from 2006 (and why) continues to be applicable. The only extension I'll add today is:

• Firebug: I only need this once in a blue moon to analyze site structures so that I can write a Stylish rule to defeat their attempts at bad layouts. In a spirit of minimalism I don't keep it installed at other times.

(I write these entries partly so that I can come here on a new machine and immediately have links to all of the extensions that I want to install in order to civilize my Firefox.)