I’ve never been one that has ever turned a challenge, nor have I ever been one to enjoy taking something as stock. If you’ve never noticed, I love to tweak things until they break, learn from my mistakes, and take a step back from the breaking point next time. A prime example of all this can be looked at during my newbie days in Linux, and I removed the kernel of my Ubuntu 8.04 install… which of course, broke my entire computer system and when I rebooted, had nothing left to use. When I reinstalled 8.04 a few minutes later, I removed a lot of other packages… but never touched the kernel again.

My motto has always been ‘Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you land among the stars‘, and if you ask me, truer words have never been said. We can aim for something solid and miss, and still manage to learn from our mistakes. It is not a failure at all unless we have failed to learn something from our mistakes. And though trial and error, I present to you a list of add-ons that have done me well over my course of the past three years: recommendations, if you will, for both Chrome and Firefox.

Keep in mind, how I’m tabulating this list is Firefox\Chrome, Firefox first, then Chrome.

AdBlock Plus\AdSweep – AdBlock Plus and AdSweep are of the same general idea: blocking ads across the board. I know there’s quite a few ‘noisy’ ads that drive me up a way every time, but this at least tames even them.

DownThemAll (Firefox only) – One of the reasons I don’t use Chrome is the lack of an alternative to DownThemAll. Yes there are other download managers out there, but when DownThemAll is the best one under Linux and you try to use the same software on both systems: you’re up a creek otherwise. DownThemAll is often one of the first add-ons I install just because I’m a power downloader of Linux ISOs. The only other reason? It’s not the default in 99.9% of Linux distros.

Greasemonkey\Built-In Support – If you’ve never used Greasemonkey before, you have been missing a lot. I’m actually planning a list of Greasemonkey scripts for the forum down the road that I’ve found insanely useful, from Facebook to Rapidshare and back again.

StumbleUpon (works for both) – Not so much an add-on as it is a way of wasting time, StumbleUpon has taken over when I’m bored. If you’ve never used it, well, you might want to start if you have the spare time… because believe me, it’s going to take all the time you can think of and then some… it’s actually the reason why this article came out late. If you’d like to follow me, my username’s hellnoire, just like it is on the forum.

MyWOT (works for both) – If you want to know the #1 thing that keeps me safe from unsafe browsing, my answer would be common sense. #2 would be MyWOT. It is seriously one of the things that I would love to see built INTO the browser, so we don’t have to worry about people falling pray to social engineering so easily. This might not stop it completely… but it certainly covers about 99% of the bases that common sense should be able to cover the rest!

Ubiquity (Firefox only) – Ubiquity is now a dead experiment Mozilla put out a while back that was simply one of the best add-ons for Firefox if you asked me. You could drop a Google map into an email or use Firefox just by using words… it was one of a kind and while discontinued at this point, I do wish it would be one that Mozilla would breath life into again.

ReadItLater (works for both) – If you like saving your tabs to read at a later date, this might just be the answer you are looking for. At least, until you’ve filled this up and need to clear it out… which believe me, I have a nasty habit of doing. Yesterday’s post was because I actually decided to go though it…

And these are just some of the add-ons I use day-to-day. Believe me when I say I use a lot more then what I’ve got listed here, and if you have any suggestions or would like to offer a better replacement to one of them, please share it in the comments below. I do have one final thing to share before I conclude this post, and that’s that Raymond would like to pass along that the graphs will only be up by tomorrow. I hope you all have a good day now and happy Canada Day to all fellow Canadians!