== My Firefox 7 extensions

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 FixingGoogleRedesign]]
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 HaveATestingBrowser]] 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 Firefox3Extensions]]:

* [[NoScript https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/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
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-in-one-gestures/]]
  (or more specifically [[my tweaked version of it
  ../programming/AllInOneCustomization]]) 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 http://www.xuldev.org/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 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/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
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-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
  BrowsersMakeBadEditors]]. Now that I actually run a current version
  of Firefox I can actually use it, [[unlike earlier
  BrowsersMakeBadEditorsII]].

* I had to switch to [[CookieMonster
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monster/]] 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 FirefoxExtensions]] 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 FirefoxExtensions]]
(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.)