Here’s a site worth bookmarking. Add-ons are the big thing Firefox offers that the other browsers don’t, but it sometimes comes at the price of performance. And I guess Mozilla is tired of that, so now they’re testing add-on speed and publishing the results at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ .
I don’t see anything I use in the top 10, but Adblock Plus, unfortunately, is #12. I’ve been recommending it as a security measure for a very long time. Of course, antivirus software slows your machine down too; security is rarely free, in terms of computing resources. On a marginal machine, you might want to take another approach to blocking malware domains.
Greasemonkey is #15. I may be though with using that; I didn’t reinstall it when I upgraded to Firefox 4 and I find I’m not missing it. There are some web sites that work a lot better with Greasemonkey customization, but I don’t visit many of those anymore. Which makes sense. I have little use for sites that care so little about usable design as to leave it to their users. (I’m looking at you, Reddit.)
And at #49, I find Better Privacy, but its performance impact is only 1%. That’s another thing I haven’t reinstalled since upgrading to Firefox 4, but I probably should.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.