I’m spending this weekend cleaning up the computer, scanning it for bugs and defrag, all that fun maintenance stuff. I try to do this once in awhile to keep things running smoothly.

I ended up completely uninstalling Firefox, wiped the whole thing off my computer and then reinstalled it. I was having ‘issues’ with it and thought I’d just toast it all and try again.

Curious things to note:

After I uninstalled Firefox (including the user settings and extensions and bookmarks, everything), my surfing was much faster and a few sites that were giving me problems (like Linkshare, Commission Junction, Clickbank) – loaded faster and cleaner than I can remember. I have no idea why. Also a problem I had been dealing with just went away. If I was online for any length of time, I couldn’t login to CJ or CB and a few other places. After logging in I would get a ‘this page does not exist’ dead web page error. I thought it had something to do with my router or wireless connection. Guess not.

Anyhow, all things are back to normal and better than ever. Firefox is installed again and I spent time picking and choosing the extensions to add. These are probably familiar to you already, but there may be one or two you missed:

http://scribbling.net/projects/firefoxextensions/aboutsite/
About This Site Firefox Extension – gives you one-click access to various services that provide information about the web page you are viewing.

http://adblock.mozdev.org/
Adblock – content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker.

http://mozmonkey.com/
Bandwidth Tester – Tells you the bandwidth of your current internet connection.

http://www.extenzilla.it/bbcodextra/index.php?lang=eng&sez=1
BBCodeXtra is an extension, compatible with Mozilla FireFox and Mozilla Suite, which adds to the context menu new commands to insert BBCode/Html/XHtml codes in an easy and fast way.

http://steeev.f2o.org/mt/cat_ebay.html
Ebay Negs! The Ebay Negative Feedback Checking

http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/06/ext2abc/
Ext2Abc – Adds a “Sortâ€? button on the extension manager to arrange your extensions alphabetically.

http://www.epigoon.com/index.php?p=10
Feedview is a Firefox extension that shows newsfeeds/blogs in a more stylish way.

http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/
ForecastFox is an extension that brings international weather from The Weather Chanel® to your Firefox web browser.

http://www.iosart.com/foxytunes/firefox/
Foxy Tunes Now you can control your favorite media player without ever leaving the browser and more..

http://rip.mozdev.org/
Rip (Remove it Permanently) provides the ability to point at and remove permanently any item you can select. It provide a flexible and easily configurable solution to removing unwanted content from a web page. (See what you can do to those nasty flyin ads with this!)

http://sage.mozdev.org/
Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension

http://twanno.mozdev.org/
Tab Clicking Options – With the Tab Clicking Options extension it is possible to set various actions to different clicking events on the tabbar or a tab in the firefox browser.

http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/site/TheOneKEA/tabprefs/
Tabbrowser Preferences

http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_textlink.html.en
Text Link – This allows URI texts written in webpages to be loaded by double clicks.

http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/word-count/
Word Count – Will count the number of words in any text that is selected. Simply highlight the text, right-click, and select “Word Countâ€?.

http://www.prgooglebar.org/
PRGooglebar is a modification of the Googlebar extension for Mozilla and Firefox. It adds the long awaited Pagerank to the toolbar.

http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragentswitcher/
User Agent Switcher Extension – extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.

Although I only ever used Firefox mainly as a feedreader (still using my tabbed IE based browser), now that things seem to be running much better who knows, I could be a Firefox disciple yet. (ummm needs to start up A LOT faster before I’ll make that move).