Loading up Firefox for me is like calling forth a beast which has to first wake up, then grumble on out of it’s cave. I’ve got a lot of addons running and I’d say I utilize roughly 85% of them on a daily basis. Here are some of my absolute must-haves:

• Adblock Plus

It makes me supremely happy to surf the web without being advertised to and extremely angry when I visit a site with a sidebar (or often, a second sidebar) crammed full of ads. Everyone likes to get paid, son, but shit. Ads are the second reason as to why I refuse to use Internet Explorer (the first being that it sucks at standards-compliance).

• ColorfulTabs

I usually have at least four open tabs and being able to easily distinguish them is a bonus. That you can select the fade on non-focused tabs is awesome.

• Greasemonkey

What is the Internet like without this? I cannot remember. Greasemonkey is a beast and has a fantastic community of folks who are just as anal as I am when it comes to being able to customize your experience. I haven’t had to click the Next Page button on Flickr or a Google search in FOREVER.

• Undo Closed Tabs Button

Why oh why did I just close that tab?! With this addon it doesn’t matter if it was the most recently closed tab or if I closed it 60 tabs ago, it’s in the history.

• BetterSearch

This works well in tandem with some of my Greasemonkey scripts; it shows small screenshots of each search result.

• ColorZilla

I love you, ColorZilla. Allows you to identify any color, anywhere on a website.

• Image Zoom

Hate it when folks only post small sizes of images? Me too. Zoom in!

• MeasureIt

Good for web development; find the size right on the screen.

• Mouse Gestures Redoux

There’s something about being able to go back a page just by right-clicking and dragging left.

• PDF Download

I get to decide how to deal with PDFs: open, save, or view in another tab.

• Web Developer

The best addon in my collection. Could not live without it, I think.

• Delicious Bookmarks

How I save everything I find, quickly.

• DownThemAll!

A mass downloader. Great for visiting mp3 blogs.

• Fetch Text URL

I hate it when web addresses aren’t hyperlinked. Select the URL, right-click, open in new tab.

• Screengrab

Creates an image of the entire website.

• TwitterBar/Twitterfox

TwitterBar lets you post to Twitter via the address bar. Twitterfox let’s you post to Twitter and receive updates.