A whirlwind tour through the powerful and diverse world of Firefox extensions.

Plugins and extensions—they're what made Photoshop such a bonanza from the late 1980s onward, and they gave it the market push to triumph over competitors who preferred to keep their tools and development completely in-house. It was a great idea—make your own product more valuable by letting other people enhance it for their own benefit—and it worked famously. In the graphics world, everyone's got 'em now. But, in the browsing world...well, it takes an open-source project to apply that kind of functionality across categories.

Firefox did it, and it's one of the innovations that has helped Mozilla claw its way up from the bottom of the stack in the browser wars. Even though Internet Explorer still comes bundled with Windows, and Safari with Mac OS, and Konqueror with KDE, users across platforms opt for Firefox with greater and greater frequency. It's not just the tabbed browsing, or the built-in pop-up blockers, or the standards-compliance or the built-in search box—it's also the add-ons.

The Mozilla Project's plugin-based architecture turns a solid application into a customizer's paradise. The projects available on the Mozilla Add-ons site now stretch into the thousands, which gives the end user the opposite problem of the no-choice straitjacket of certain other browsers. The embarrassment of riches means too much choice, and figuring out how to narrow it down is no mean task.

The extensions come in a variety of flavors—from add-on applications to interface tweaks to toolbars. Here are a few that most users will find very handy. They extend functionality, enhance privacy and give users a leg up on taking their favorite content with them wherever they wish to go.

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