In his blog fidusinterpres, Fabio Said shares a list of Firefox extensions that have worked for him. Here are some excerpts  from his article:

Search

1. Add to Search Bar – This is extreme handy, and it works like this: for (almost) every website with a search box you can install that search box into Firefox’s search bar, which is usually located on the top right of your browser. When installed as a search engine, you can use a website’s search box without visiting the website first – just type the word and hit Enter, and then you are going to be forwarded to the website in question. Didn’t find what you were looking for? Just press Ctrl+K to place your cursor inside the search bar and choose another search engine you have previously installed and hit Enter to search your term in that website, without typing the term again. To install a website’s search engine, you simply right-click inside the website’s search box and choose a name for it – it will immediately appear among Firefox’s search engines. To see how Add to Search Bar works,check to my January 2009 article on that extension.

2. Context Search – This is also very handy. When installed, you simply highlight a term on a Web page and right-click on it – you will now see a “Search for” menu option. Clicking on this option you will have quick access to all the search engines you installed – just click on a search engine, say Wikipedia or IATE or LEO or PONS etc., and you will be taken to the Wikipedia (or IATE or LEO or PONS etc.) page about the term you are searching. Doesn’t it work beautifully?

3. Organize Search Engines – This is a nice extension if you have installed a lot of search engines and need to organize them in chunks so that you can have quicker access to them. For example, there are certain search engines I do not use often – like some discussion lists’ search box (say, memoQ, Zahlungspraxis, TranslationPayments – yes, you can install all of them as search engines for Firefox!), so I would rather have them at the bottom of the search engines list, separated by a division line. I have division lines separating all my legal search engines, all my financial search engines, all my corpora search engines etc.

Spell checkers

4. United States English Spell checker – I need spell checkers not just for Word documents. I need them for webmail, for my blog posts, for comments I write on other people’s posts etc. Writing all that on a Word document and them copy & paste it into Firefox will not work for me. Too unproductive. So I installed several spell checkers for Firefox for each language I use.

5. German Dictionary – This is the equivalent of the the spell checker for U.S. English I highlight above.

6. Dicionário para Ortografia pt-BR – This is a spell checker for Brazilian Portuguese that is not very good, but it is the only one that works with Firefox’s latest build.

Productivity

7. Download Statusbar – This extension puts you more in control of your downloads. You can pause a download to resume it later, you can delete a downloaded file from the Firefox status bar instead of opening Windows Explorer first, and much more.

8. FireFTP – Why have a standalone FTP application if you can have it as a Firefox extension? I need an FTP application to upload files to my websites or to send files that are to big to be emailed. The FireFTP extension is very stable. Highly recommended.

9. AdBlock Plus – You know certain ads are annoying and can make a browsing experience less productive. So AdBlock Plus will help you get rid of ads. You can control ads for each website or page. After you begin using AdBlock, you will certainly ask yourself how you could possibly have done without it all these years…

Social media

10. HootSuite Hootlet – If you are a heavy user of Twitter and like to share interesting links there, you can open an account at hootsuite.com and install HootSuite’s Hootlet extension. When installed, this extension occupies a tiny, strategic place on your bookmarks bar and allows you to tweet and share links with just one click. You can even schedule tweets for a future date. A time saver! Definitely useful.

See: fidusinterpres