Wow! It really is tough to imagine life before Firefox… a couple of months into using it as my default browser I'm just lovin' it! The real "Killer Feature" of Firefox has to be the extension (plugin) architecture. I have discoverd some very cool plugins that have made the transition incredibly fulfilling and so I thought I would share 5 of the best… so far

• The Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick HAS to take the No.1 spot.
  The toolbar includes the ability to turn off CSS to view semantic markup, turn off images, outline page elements such as block level elements and tables, validation and SO MUCH MORE. I can't recomend this extension enough if you do any sort of web development.
• FireBug, which I only discovered recently takes a close second.
  At it's core it allows you to drill through a pages structure (aka the DOM) and debug the JavaScript including the ability to add break points. Unfortunatley the current version of FireBug (0.4) is not compatible with Flock and 0.3 doesn't appear to have the JavaScript dubugging functionality.
• IE Tab
  As I mentioned in my previous post, for anyone that works in an Internet Explorer centric world (most/all of us unfortunatly) IE Tab is a god send. It allows you to specify URL's that will use the IE rendering engine within the Firefox browser interface. You can also click on the browser logo to the left of the status bar to swith back and forth between the rendering engines. Great for corss browser compatability checking.
• FireFTP
  A full featured FTP client in the browser! Need I say more? The user interface is the same intuative left to right interface that you would expect with any good FTP client, supports drag and drop and has all the functionality most users need, including secure connections.
• Gmail Manager
  This extension displays notifications from the browser status bar as well as from the Windows System Tray and gives you an overview of your GMail inbox, storage usage and unread mail, when you roll over the status bar. I know both GTalk and recent versions of the Google Toolbar support Gmail notifications, but this just feels a little more integrated.

I'm sure there are many other extentions I still haven't discovered but I'm lookin'! and if there are any you think deserve to be on this list by all means let me know.

BTW, as the title of this post would suggest, I'm currently playing with the latest beta of Flock, a significantly enhanced browser based on Firefox, and while there are still a few flaws that would prevent me from adopting it in a more full time role it is a VERY promising project.

Features of note include an integrated Flickr/PhotoBucket photo viewer, enhanced user interface, built-in blog posting for most of the mainstream blogging tools, integration with De.lico.us and an integrated RSS Feed reader.