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What do you mean by add-ons / extensions for Mozilla / Firefox / Thunderbird / Netscape 7 ? Are those add-ons / extensions free? Before installing an add-on / extension, is there anything I have to take into consideration? How can I uninstall extensions? What cool add-ons / extensions are there? Where can I find more extensions?

• What do you mean by add-ons / extensions for Mozilla / Firefox / Thunderbird / Netscape 7 ?
  Add-ons are little tools that help make Mozilla based browsers and email clients even more fun to use, or in some cases help make the user more productive. They can come in the form of "actual" extensions that you install, or they can come in the form of bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are Javascript snippets that are not installed. When added to your bookmarks and activated (clicked) they act on whatever page you're viewing while you trigger them. Their advantage is that they do not become part of the browser, i.e. they can easily be removed and many will even work in several browsers.
   
• Are those add-ons / extensions free?
  The ones featured here are free. However, commercial add-ons / extensions should soon become available, but anything on this page is non-commercial unless otherwise noted.
   
• Before installing an add-on / extension, is there anything I have to take into consideration?
  Yes.
  - First of all, make sure that it works with your version of the Mozilla browser,i.e. both the product (Mozilla Suite, Firefox or Thunderbird) and version number. This should not be a problem with sidebar tabs.
  - Some more elaborate extensions may cause stability problems. That is the reason why I have not linked to them from here. I have many of the add-ons listed below and they have worked fine for me. However, you are installing / using them at your own risk!
  
  Important! Make sure to uninstall/remove extensions before upgrading to a newer version of your Mozilla product. Otherwise, the extension may cause the updated version to not run properly.
   
• How can I uninstall extensions?
  This depends on the Mozilla product you are using:
  - Firefox and Thunderbird: Select Tools -> Extensions to open the extension manager which allows you to view, update and remove extensions.
  - Mozilla Suite: Some extensions offer uninstallers. To remove these extensions, select Edit -> Preferences and look for the extension's name. If it does not appear in this list / does not come with an uninstall function, you can use Extension uninstaller to view and remove installed extensions.
  Extension uninstaller has not been updated as of June 12th, 2006 to work with the Seamonkey Suite.
  Note: If you are developing an extension, you can use the extension uninstaller API to add uninstall functionality for your Mozilla Suite extension: Extension Uninstaller API.
   
• What cool add-ons / extensions are there?
  Here's a short list of interesting add-ons / extensions I have found:
  
  - Thunderbird Static Desktop Icon. "With these .reg files, you can add a Thunderbird icon to your desktop with extra abilities. Simply run Thunderbird-On.reg and refresh the desktop to enable the icon, and run Thunderbird-Off.reg to remove it."
  
  - Accessibar. "Accessibar is a toolbar extension for the Mozilla browser which aims at providing various accessibility features for users who could benefit from them. These features primarily focus on the dynamic manipulation of the visual display of the web page in addition to the integration of a text to speech reader which can read out loud the browser's user interface as well as web page content."
  - FoxyTunes. This has to be one of the coolest, if not the coolest extension for the Mozilla Suite, Firefox and Thunderbird. It allows you control a large variety of Media Players such as e.g. Winamp and Windows Media Player from within Mozilla by adding a set of controls to one of your Mozilla toolbars. Foxytunes is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Note to Netscape 7.x users: I tested FoxyTunes 1.0 with Netscape 7.2 and it did not work properly (icons were not displayed).
  - Chromedit. This very useful extension is a user file editor that lets you customize your Mozilla application (Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird). It allows you to easily edit your user.js, prefs.js, usercontent.css and userchrome.css files from within the browser.
  - Mozbraille. "MozBraille is an extension to transform Mozilla or Firefox to a stand alone accessible Internet browser designed for blind or partially sighted users". It adds support for Braille Output, text-to-speach output, and a big characters view.
  - Spellchecker Extension. This extension allows you to use Mozilla's spellchecker for checking the spelling in textarea fields which are e.g. used for message boards. A very useful extension.
  - Companion for Mozilla. Companion for Mozilla is a clone of the Yahoo Companion Toolbar. Please note that this is not offered by Yahoo but rather a clone.
  - BBCode. Adds a context menu for easy access to BBCODE formating (e.g. font size, color, weight,...) in PHBB Forums (Firefox/Mozilla Suite/Netscape 7.x)
  - GMailCompose. Adds a context menu link for opening a GMail compose window when clicking on mailto: links and when marking plain text email addresses (Firefox/Mozilla Suite/Netscape 7.x)
  - Mozilla Amazon Browser (MAB). If you are an Amazon customer, this is a very useful add-on.
  The MAB is a tool for searching the Amazon catalogs and browsing their products. For the time being users can search in Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.jp. MAB lets users search for products (by keyword, ASIN/ISBN, UPC code, author/artist, and so on) and retrieve information about each product found, including its title, author/artist, and release date (the latter two for books/music), along with its suggested retail price, Amazon's price, and the price of a used copy sold through Amazon (if available). It also displays comments from other Amazon users about the product.
  I especially like the print function, which creates an ordered list of your search results with pictures (if available).
  - Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances. This site has many bookmarklets that - as the name implies - help you "zap" many of the annoynaces you encounter in websites.
  - Cosmic Cat Creations. This site has many useful Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird extensions like e.g. Statusbar Clock which adds a clock to your browser's status bar that can display the time and date in a fully customizable format. See what it looks like in the screenshot below. This is a very useful extension for those who (like me) hide the Windows task bar to free up screen space.
  
  
  - Jesse's Bookmarklet site. This site features many useful bookmarklets.
  - Spiegel Sidebar Tab: "Der Spiegel" is considered by many to be Germany's premier News Magazine. Get the latest news (in German) from "Der Spiegel" in your Mozilla or Netscape 6/7 sidebar .
  - Preferential: The Preferential project aims to provide all users of Gecko browsers (eg. Mozilla, Phoenix) with a simple, accessible GUI (user interface) that allows the modification of any preference set within that browser environment..
  Mozilla contains countless preferences that can only be changed by manually modifying the "prefs.js" or "user.js" files. Preferential lets you see and edit these preferences in a convenient tree sturcture. Explanations what many of them do are given, as well. Preferential is a highly recommended add-on for those who want to tweak and customize their Gecko-based browser.
  A word of caution: Be careful what you change.
  - Tabscroller: When you click with your right mouse button, then scroll with your scrollwheel, you get a menu with all the open tabs. Advantage is, that you can see the whole title of the page, and that you have a nice overall view of the pages you got open. It's a nice feature that allows you to navigate quick and easy through your tabs, and it will cause you less mousemeters
  You can find more information on Tabscroller in this Mozillazine forum thread.
  Please note that Tabscroller does not (yet) come with an uninstaller. You can find uninstall instructions in the Mozillazine forum thread.
  - Adblock:AdBlock is an image filtering plug-in for Mozilla. It can essentially be seen as a program that allows more fine-grained image-control than Mozilla's built-in "Block images from this server"-function. It's capable of removing both images and flash animations.
  - Yahoo companion for Mozilla: This is the Yahoo Companion toolbar for Mozilla. It does not (yet) contain all the features of the original Yahoo Companion Toolbar (which is currently only available for IE and Netscape 4.x), but is is getting there and it has the same look and feel. Please note that Companion for Mozilla is not released by Yahoo, but rather by a Mozdev project.
  - MozTweak: Moztweak provides instant access to a variety of Mozilla settings that can be altered from [a] GUI interface. This add-on lets you access and change a wide variety of hidden prefs, not only for the browser but for the mail and news client, as well.
  - Googlebar: Googlebar is a toolbar for Mozilla that lets you use the Google search engine. It is similar in functionality and appearance to the official Google Toolbar that is available for IE. It offers many features such as specialty searches, configurable toolbar buttons, in-page-search (simply mark text in a web page and right click. You will see several Googlebar options for the marked text such as "web search" or "translate") and much more.
  
      Googlebar
  
  - Google sidebar panel: The Google sidebar panel does pretty much the same thing as the Googlebar, but it is officially available from Google. The main difference here is the location - Google sidebar panel is, as the name implies, in Mozilla's side bar.
  - Optimoz: Optimoz is a Mozilla plugin that adds mouse gesture support. What are mouse gestures? Simply put, they allow you to control your browser through mouse movements. By e.g. holding the center mouse button and moving the mouse to the left, Mozilla would go back to the previous page ("back" function), moving the mouse to the right would go forward to a page. Once you get used to mouse gestures, they make browsing a lot faster.
  - Leo Online Dictionary: Leo is one of the largest English-German online dictionaries, plus it's free. They offer a sidebar tab for Mozilla. Simply enter a German or English word, klick on "Search" (or "Suchen") and a popup window with the translation(s) will open. This is great for school, work and conversation. I use it regularly.
  - XUL Apps: This site has some very nice add-ons like the Tab-Browser extensions (adds more options for tabbed browsing), Context Menu extensions (This utility extends the context menu of Mozilla (and Netscape 6, 7), and adds some useful features.) and the Policy Manager. Policy Manager allows you to create groups like "Trusted sites" and "untrusted sites" and specify what sites that belong to these groups can and cannot do (e.g. open Popup Windows). Here is a screenshot:
  
  
  These are very nice add-ons, especially policy manager, but I felt like tabbrowser extensions did give me problems with Mozilla, however they worked fine for others. Do make sure to copy the uninstall instructions before installing them.
  - Prefbar: Prefbar is a toolbar that gives you quick access to frequently changed preferences (instead of having to got the "Edit" -> "Preferences" ->... route.
  - Home Button: Miss the big "Home" Button? No problem! Home Button adds a big home button to your Navigation toolbar (next to the "Stop Button").
   
• Where can I find more extensions?
  You can find an extensive list of available Mozilla extensions at Mozilla Update and Extension Room. In addition, Mozdev.org host many extensions for Mozilla.
   

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