Short and sweet, here is a list of just the essentials:

Live Http Headers

This extension is definitely bad ass. Once you turn it, it lets you see all the headers your browser sees as you visit sites and click on links.  Why should you care?  Because it lets you do a little reverse engineering of ad campaigns.  Let’s say your on a site and you see an ad that looks interesting. When you click on it, you get shot straight to the landing page.  But how did you really get there?  Turn on Live Http headers to find out.  Once on, you will be able to see all the redirects.  That means you will see stuff like the url of the adserver, the affiliate’s tracking url, and the offer’s url the CPA network uses for tracking.   So now, at the very least, you know of a possible traffic source, and what CPA network has the offer.

Scrapbook

This extension lets you save and organize entire web sites, pages, or snippets of web pages.  This works way better than the standard “Save Page As” command.  Not only does it do a way better job, but after you grab a page/site it appears in the ScrapBook dropdown menu as a local bookmark.  That makes finding shit WAY easier.   You can use this when doing competitive research to compare various landers from other affiliates.

Shooter

When you just need a simple screenshot of a web page, Shooter kicks ass.  It’s quick and lightweight.  Shooter grabs the entire web page, even stuff off-screen. On any page, just right-click and then “shoot this page”.  The window that pops up lets you save the whole page or crop a selection.  Images save in high quality png format.  Again, awesome for taking snaps of banners or landers when doing competitive research.
Update 12/2/09, the author of Shooter has just updated this plugin so you can now copy the selection to the clipboard.  This makes it way handier to paste into another document. Sweet!

Tamper Data

Lets you view and mofity HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters.  h4x0rs?!

Web Developer

This extension lets you dissect and get info on any web page.  It also lets you tweak your browser in various ways. If you’re building pages, this extension will save you a ton of time.  Even if your not, you can easily control javascript, clear cookies (both session and domain cookies), instantly get a list of every link on a given page, show hidden elements, and more.

Roboform

This is actually a Windows application but it comes with plugins for Firefox (and IE) so it makes the list. This is the best password manager available for Windows, bar none.  It works flawlessly, encrypts all your passwords, and lets you login to password sites in 2 clicks.  The free version handles 10 pw’s, but trust me, the full version is way worth it for $30.  It will save you tons of time.

Honorable Mentions

SEO for Firefox – tons of features, by Aaron Wall.

Greasemonkey – a scripting engine that has a huge following. Hundreds of scripts are available for free and let you control how web pages display in crazy ways.

DownThemAll! – stupid name, but great download manager. I was dl’ing  a huge 2gb game patch the other night and was only getting 300K/sec from the host site.   After using this to split the dl up into 10 segments, I maxed my line out at 1.2MB/sec.  Suck it!

Did I miss any?  Post them in the comments.

Tags: firefox, time savers, Tools