Most everyone has heard of Firefox, but a lot of people don’t know how to make it work for them. This article will hopefully give you a better grasp on Firefox and ways to make it work for you beyond being a simple browser. I intend to do 3 things:

• Change your theme
• Add and remove extensions
• Give you a list of extensions to try

First of all anyone who can see knows that the default Firefox (forthwith known as “FF”) theme is butt-ugly. Atrocious. Fortunately the FF developers have seen fit to let us fix that problem by downloading and applying new themes. The easiest way to do this is by doing the following -

1. Click on “Tools” in the main FF menu
2. Click on “Add-ons” in the sub-menu
3. Click on “Themes” in the upper left corner of the new window that pops up
4. Click on “Get Themes” in the lower right corner.
5. In the new browser window that opens find a theme you like
6. Look for an icon that looks like the one below and click on it
7. Accept the install when it prompts you to do so.
8. Once it has installed you will be prompted to restart FF
9. Go back to Tools->Add-ons->Themes and select the new theme
10. Restart FF and enjoy the new theme!

As neat as themes are they are not what makes Firefox so neat. Beyond the inner coding of the rendering engine I mean. Extensions are the things that do that. An extension is basically an add-on program (script actually) which extends the browsers functionality. Location, selection, and installation of extensions closely mirrors swapping your theme to something new.
I have found the following extensions to be invaluable. Take a few minutes and check them out. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the usage of each one, but you will find plenty of information online about how each one functions.

• AddBlock Plus: Blocks pretty much all ads (and other things)
• No Script: Gives you control over javascripting
• PDF Download: Needed to properly handle PDF files
• IE Tab: Lets you view the site in Internet Explorer
• Forecast Fox: Weather
• DownThem all: A built in mass file downloader
• Stumbleupon: Social bookmarking
• Web Developer: Website development tool
• Tab Mix plus: Extended functionality of the tabs

There is a wealth of information out there if you get stuck or leave a comment here and I’ll do my best to get the answer for you. Once you get used to it you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else. At least that seems to be the common reaction I’ve come across.