Introduction
Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox are quite popular, and why not? Add-ons let you customize your Firefox browser in various ways with options including Themes, Dictionaries, Search Engines, Extensions and Plug-ins. In January 2008, it was announced that over 600 million add-ons (excluding updates) have been downloaded since they have been available. Wikipedia says that as of February 2008, there were over 4600 extensions and over 650 themes hosted on the mozilla site. With so many to explore it’s hard to choose which are the best. So what I have tried to do is to pull out some of the most popular add-ons listed on the Mozilla Firefox add-on site and to explore them for you.
If you don’t already have Firefox installed, why not?! As you will see by reading our guide to Firefox 3.0, it has more features than Internet Explorer. You can download a free copy here.
Video DownloadHelper 3.2.2 (22,201,986 total downloads)
Video DownloadHelper is a Firefox extension which allows you to download, capture and convert videos and images from different websites including YouTube, MySpace, Google videos, DailyMotion, Porkolt, iFilm, DreamHost and others. Once you install this add-on, an icon appears to the left of the address bar. The icon will animate whenever you visit a site that contains downloadable items. The add-on also allows you to customize many options. To customize the functionalities of Video DownloadHelper, right click on the icon and chose Preferences.
The Preferences window consists of five tabs. The first tab labeled General offers general options like setting the download mode, enabling or disabling icon animation, setup of the storage directory, setting up the short cut keys etc.
The second tab, MediaLink allows to you add or remove file extensions for media types so that the Video DownloadHelper can download files from a page by monitoring the HTML links. When you click on the third tab MediaReq, you can see a list of file extensions and options to remove or add new media file extensions. MediaReq examines all the outgoing HTTP requests to monitor files which DownloadHelper can download.
The fourth tab, MediaWeight is a newly added feature for detecting video and audio media files. You can enable or disable this and can also adjust the media size threshold.
The History tab allows you to configure DownloadHelper so that it can remember the videos you watched so you can easily find them again and download a selected set in batch mode. This feature is currently in beta stage.
The last tab, Conversion, is also a beta feature. It allows you to convert videos automatically as soon as they are downloaded.
Get Video DownloadHelper here!