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Ahhh... good place for questions.

I've been using Firefox (on the recommendation of my 13-year old son!) for quite a while.

One thing puzzles me: What are "extensions," and how are they used?

I'll have a few more questions before this thread falls off, so stand by.

And, Thanks!

Extensions are like addons or upgrades. They are often written by third parties, so use them at your own risk. But there are some pretty useful ones. One of my favorites was the BugMeNot extension. Whenever you went to a news website that forced you to register or login, all you had to do was right click, select "BugMeNot", and you'd be in. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be supported by the latest Firefox version yet.

One thing puzzles me: What are "extensions," and how are they used?

Firefox/Mozilla extensions are code that do a lot of useful things--one of my favorites is "Adblock", which lets you selectively block files. You install extensions and then they just work. Head over to https://update.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox and check them out.

Extensions are 'additions' to the firefox program that are written by other users. It could be a tool to use a particular search engine, a calendar popup, or one of my favorites, called 'Adblock'. Adblock allows you to ignore images from particular websites (or locations on particular websites) including flash animations. Which means you can lock out the majority of ads on the websites you visit.

Another one I use is 'gmail notifier' which allows me to log onto my gmail account, know when new e-mail arrives, and to go to that e-mail account from whatever webpage I'm on. Since I also use LiveJournal, the extension 'deepest sender' allows me to add to my blog there while browsing (as a sidebar) or in it's own window. Very handy.

So the short answer is extensions are user written tools to add to firefox.

One thing puzzles me: What are "extensions," and how are they used?

Think of extentions in the same way as you would after market improvements to your car like say, newer or "snappier" wheels, a better radio, or an improvment to your engine.

Firefox extentions are improvments to your web brower that weren't apart of your orginal download. For example one of my favorites is the bbcode extention. What does it do you might ask? Well with my "html" option checked in the bbcode extention I can enter tags into this very forum to underline, italic, color, text when I post on Free Republic. (And many other html "tags" and functions with the click of a button.)

For example when I want to underline something I just highlight the text that I want to be underlined in my Free Republic post, right click, select ----> htmlcode -----> underline . The firefox extention will add the htmltags around my selected text show it will show up in my post like so. Text text text text text.

The catch is you have to download and install the extensions and configure them the way you want them to operate. If you would like to find out what other extensions there are click on tools-----> extensions. This area is where you can list all the extensions you have as well as configure them via the "options" button. To download extensions click on ------> get more extenstions. You should be able to browse that area and download the extensions you like.

They are... extensions. Extensions to the browser's core functionality. They are developed by... whoever. To do... whatever.

Isn't that a helpful answer? :-)

I have a few extensions installed. One is an extension that adds to my contextual menu (the one you get by right clicking) to open a page in Internet Explorer. When I come to that rare page that Firefox cannot display properly (or that more common page that Firefox cannot print properly) I can right click on the window and choose "Open page in IE" and it comes up in Internet Explorer. There is another extension I use to keep my bookmarks (favorites) synchronized between several computers-- whenever my browser starts up, it goes to a server and gets my most recent bookmarks, and whenever I update my bookmarks and leave the browser it goes and saves the changes. I have quite a few others installed as well.

You can find extensions just by clicking on the Mozilla icon (top right corner of your browser) and then clicking on the link for extensions.