I've been getting a lot of requests lately from people about the Firefox plugins I use on a day to day basis. While everyone's browser needs are different, there are a few indispensable plugins that I think many people could (and already) benefit from using. They are:

• Customize Google - Forces https for many Google pages, blocks some Google ads, streams search pages so you never have to click next (since no one ever does anyways), anonymizes your Google cookies, uses Google Suggest, and more.

• Google Preview - Gives a small thumbnail preview of each search result page, immensely useful to gauge things like layout and navigation on a page before you visit it, any to find pages that you may have visited before but don't remember the URL exactly but have an idea of what the site looks like.

• Adblock Plus - Don't leave home without it. Once you've installed this plugin you'll never go back to viewing all those nasty flash and javascript ads everywhere. With this plugin you'll realize how quickly we've become desensitized to advertisements on web sites. There are some here on jamonation.com but I don't see them at all.

• RefControl - This tiny plugin allows you to control the referrer string sent when browsing between web pages and web sites. I set the default to BLOCK for all sites and haven't noticed any problems, even with online banking. This plugin is sort of invisible to the end user, but I guarantee it will minimize the amount of free data that you send to web site operators and thwart automated attempts at analyzing your online behaviour. A must.