Video DownloadHelper installs discretely - in fact, the only time you'll see it is when you look under the Tools menu, or browse a site with video. When it you see the little icon - usually in the top left corner - clicking downloads the video directly. Alternatively, click on the little triangle, and choose from other options, such as Copy URL, Convert file or Download as hidden file. This simple extension downloads anything from YouTube, to MySpace, Google Video, DailyMotion and more.

One of the great things about Video DownloadHelper is how many options it has. It's pretty impressive for a free browser add-on, and we'd really recommend checking them all out. From tweaking Video DownloadHelper's appearance and including and excluding video types to download, to sharing your videos and converting your files, Video DownloadHelper is a really slick app. Most people will be happy to use the app's default settings, but if you want a little more control over your downloads, this is most definitely an app you'll want to check out.

Video DownloadHelper is a video download app for Firefox that just gets stronger with every new version.

Download Video DownloadHelper 4.9.8 in Softonic

In this day and age, it seems like the internet giants are trying to keep tabs on everyone. Google wants to know what you're browsing for, as does Facebook, so both companies can tailor the ads you see on your pages directly to your supposed interests. They also track your location so the ads are locale-specific.

If you don't like the idea of internet companies tracking you using your personal data while browsing online, you're not alone. That's why UltraSurf Firefox Tool was created. People want privacy while web browsing and that's what they get with UltraSurf Firefox Tool, at least according to the app's developers.

UltraSurf Firefox Tool performs a myriad of different tasks in order to protect your privacy online while using Firefox as a browser. For example, it will bypass firewalls for you, encrypt all of your web-based activities so they can't be tracked, circumvent censors and mask your IP address, making you virtually untraceable online. Best of all is that UltraSurf Firefox Tool is completely invisible, so it won't get in the way of your browsing experience.

UltraSurf Firefox Tool's biggest plus is also a huge downside though. If you can't see it working, how do you know it's working at all? Some users will find this frustrating and not be able to tell if UltraSurf Firefox Tool is doing the job it says it does.

If you can get past that though, UltraSurf Firefox Tool is a pretty handy feature for Firefox web surfers.

Download UltraSurf Firefox Tool 2.0 in Softonic

Genieo is a small, simple tool that builds a custom homepage automatically in just a few minutes, based on your browsing history and your site preferences. This first site is built right after you launch the program for the first time, and can take up to 20 minutes.

After that, your homepage is ready to use. Launch your browser (or restart it) and you'll see a new homepage with headlines, web feeds, links to your favorite sites and more – all based on your own preferences. Of course, you can easily customize this draft by adding or removing feeds as you like. Genieo also lets you track your friends' activities on Facebook and Twitter.

Overall, Genieo seems to be a nice alternative to more traditional home pages like the Firefox one or iGoogle. On the downside, those worried about their privacy may not be happy about the program checking your browsing history – though there's really nothing dangerous about it.

GEnieo helps you build a totally automatic custom homepage in a few minutes.

Download Genieo 1.0 Beta in Softonic

DivX Web Player lets you watch DivX videos directly in your web browser without resorting to the standalone player, bringing the DivX playing experience even closer to you. DivX Web Player allows you to play videos in full screen with navigation controls, or in a separate window so you can continue browsing other sites without losing the video.

It's a particularly interesting tool for bloggers and webmasters because it allows you to embed DivX videos with a simple slice of HTML code. You can even change the skin of the player on your blog to give it an extra personal look.

On installation, DivX Web Player tries to install Google's Chrome browser but you can uncheck this option (although I'd highly recommend trying it if you haven't yet). When DivX Web Player detects a video, it offers you the chance of saving it to disk, and while it is downloading, you can still watch it.

There have been reported problems of DivX Web Player not working very well in Firefox 3, although DivX claims this has been fixed now. However, when switching back from Embedded mode, to Windowed mode, I found that the screen went black even though the video and sound continued to play.

As you'd expect from DivX however, the quality of both sound and vision is outstanding. There are also several useful preferences to choose from. By clicking on the DivX logo in the bottom-right corner of the player, you can elect to save the file to disk, switch audio tracks, control playback and switch viewing modes. There are also plenty of preferences to play with, although these could have done with a little more explanation. Most users won't know which type of processing mode to choose for example, although changing from Automatic Deblocking to Fixed Deblocking didn't seem to make much difference.

For anyone who watches a lot of DivX video online or is a big fan of the DivX player, DivX Web Player definitely won't disappoint.

Download DivX Web Player 2.0.2.39 Beta 2 in Softonic

In fact Greasemonkey is not an application in itself. It’s a Firefox add-on that prepares your browser to support Greasemonkey scripts. The add-on puts a small monkey icon in the bottom right corner, from where you can add new scripts and manage the ones you’ve already installed. Other than that, it doesn’t include any configuration options.

The first time you launch Greasemonkey you’re presented with an introductory website which contains basic information and a link to Userscripts, where you can download scripts. Be sure to bookmark this site, as Greasemonkey doesn’t include a link to it anywhere.

Of course, you can also create your own scripts and use them with Greasemonkey – but that requires coding knowledge.

With Greasemonkey you can use hundreds of scripts to change the way popular websites look and behave.

Download Greasemonkey 0.9.13 in Softonic

Any helping hand is therefore received with open arms and FireBug does much of the hard work for you. FireBug is a Firefox extension that allows you to monitor and tinker with JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and Ajax through a combination of a powerful debugger, error console, command line, and code inspectors. There are many other minor features to FireBug but the most important by far is the debugger, which automatically checks your code line by line.

The debugger sets breakpoints in your scripts and examines every step of execution in real time. Particularly handy is the FireBug icon in the Firefox status bar which tells you instantly if your page is broken. Just open the FireBug panel and you'll see exactly what the problem is - no more scouring through reams of script in the JavaScript Console window. You can open Firebug in a separate window, or as a bar at the bottom of your browser, and also configure a blacklist of sites that you'd like it to exclude.

For any developer who has been driven mad by debugging, FireBug provides an ultra quick, easy and headache-free way of developing your code.

Download FireBug 1.9.0 in Softonic

Gmail Manager Extension is an excellent application which allows you to check your e-mail directly from Firefox's toolbar. You can manage multiple accounts and receive new notifications directly to your desktop instead of having to check Gmail all the time.

The program displays account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets. You can specify at what intervals you want to check for Gmail and can customise exactly where you want to place the notifier either in your toolbar and statusbar.

I already use a toolbar which can check my Gmail although I stopped using it a while back because it sometimes used to freeze-up Firefox periodically. However, this extension poses no such problems and prevents the awkward need to change into a new tab to see if you have new mail all the time. On the downside, it would have been nice to have been able to choose a few default notification sounds or alerts to alert you to new e-mail when you are away from your computer but it's hardly a major drawback.

If you're a Gmail user, you'll love this simple extension which makes keeping track of your favourite e-mail client a breeze.

Download Gmail Manager Extension 0.6.4.1 in Softonic

Once installed, the Twitter home page will essentially load twice. This adds a fraction of time, but it's not prohibitive. Immediately, there are three buttons above the "what are you doing?" box - post photo, shorten link and today's question. The first two are really useful, and you can choose which photo site to utilize. The shorten link gives you a few extra characters to tweet with.

Today's Question is a silly option, but if you're really desperate for something to tweet, you can always use that to answer. Much better is that all the shortened links in your Twitter feed are expanded so you can see exactly what they contain. It also adds a re-tweet RT tab to each tweet, which is currently missing from the normal Twitter page.

While all this is useful, it comes at a price, which is an advert added to the sidebar. It's not too intrusive, but noticeable. Over all, while the functions are useful they do make the minimal Twitter design a bit more cluttered. If you're not too bothered about that, you may find it a really useful tool.

Power Twitter really does make the Twitter home page more useful!

Download Power Twitter Firefox 2.02 in Softonic

As far as privacy apps go, Cocoon is very, very discreet. Once it is enabled, all you will see is an attractive blue toolbar that doesn’t even look like one. You’ll need a free Cocoon account to use the service. Once you have a username and password, sign into Cocoon and begin to browse. According to the developers, Cocoon will establish “a secure encrypted connection to the Internet”, so that nobody can see who you are or what you are doing.

It’s pretty hard to gauge the accuracy of this claim on a casual basis, but from our testing, it seemed promising. We could access geographically restricted websites, meaning our location was hidden, and we couldn’t log into websites without re-entering our log-in information, meaning we were cookie-free. Cocoon also claims to protect you from viruses and malware you might pick up online.

Cocoon doesn’t stop there. It also allows you to create a throw-away email address – Mailslots – that allow you risk-free sign-ups when a website or service absolutely demands your details. It also has its own history feature and a cookie eraser. All your information is stored “in the cloud”, so whatever you do in Cocoon (bookmarks, notes, etc.), it is also available from wherever you log in.

Bear in mind, however, that using Cocoon does effect lots of settings in Firefox, even after it has been uninstalled. Although the add-on was very useful while we were using it, we had a hard time getting everything back to normal once we were done.

Cocoon is a user-friendly and discreet app that will keep you as safe and private as possible when working online.

Download Cocoon 1.16 d in Softonic

It works with .FLV files from a variety of websites and integrates into your browser very discreetly. One of Fast Video Download's strongest points is that it automatically detects when an .FLV video appears embedded on a website. When one is detected, the program icon changes color, letting you know a video is available.

This version of Fast Video Download also comes with SearchMenu, a search function that integrates into the context menu. If you click on the Fast Video Download icon in the upper right-hand corner of your browser, you'll see a settings menu. Here you'll be able to see comprehensive SearchMenu options and adequate configuration options for Fast Video Download.

As a video detector and download helper, Fast Video Download works well. It integrates perfectly with Firefox's standard download function and is able to "pick up" videos that are otherwise hard to get. It doesn’t integrate directly with download accelerators, but by starting the download normally and taking the URL from the standard manager, you should be able to make it work.

We did have one major gripe with Fast Video Download - when you click on the Fast Video Download window, you are presented with various options, including Video Conversion and Advanced Video Tools. These look like settings for Fast Video Download, when in fact they are separate programs that you must download from the developer's website. Once you realize this, there is no problem, but on principle, it is misleading and irritating.

If you regularly download .FLV from certain websites, Fast Video Download is a useful add-on.

Download Fast Video Download Firefox add-on 4.1.3 in Softonic

Fasterfox is a simple add-on that allows dynamic speed increases via a prefetching mechanism. This speeds-up browsing by loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing in the background. This means that before you've even clicked on a link, Firefox has already loaded the page so it's instantly ready for surfing.

However, there is a drawback to pre-fetching which is that it does consume considerable bandwidth. If you're on a broadband connection on your own, this is no big deal but if you share a connection, or are working on a network connection, it may be a problem. If you're worried about this, you should check out Fasterfox Lite which allows you to control pre-fetching in Firefox.

Fasterfox allows a high degree of tweaking to network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. There's even a split-second page load timer which tests the effectiveness of your settings. Finally, there's also a handy popup blocker included in Fasterfox to block Flash popups.

There's very little to fault in Fasterfox. It may slightly increase the RAM usage of Firefox (like many add-ons) and consume bandwidth but the faster performance is definitely noticeable.

Download Fasterfox 2.0.0 in Softonic

Bing Bar, which is compatible with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, puts the Bing search bar in prime position within your browser. This allows you to search the web for anything from any page you are visiting.

Bing Bar auto-suggests search terms as you type then loads the results page in your browser. The search bar can even be set to show answers within the pop-up window, rather than having to go to the results page. This is useful for things like stock prices and mathematical calculations.

Cool tools

There's much more to Bing Bar than just this search short-cut. The toolbar can also be used to check the latest news, get weather forecasts, and watch the latest hot videos from the web. Bing Bar also integrates nicely with Microsoft's Live services, giving you notifications of latest Hotmail emails, and allowing you to access Windows Live features such as photos, calendar, groups, etc.

Bing Bar is highly customizable. As well as changing the look of the toolbar, you can choose which tools you'd like to appear in it. Handy ones to try out include Autofill, which allows you to complete web forms with a single click; E-mail page, which lets you quickly share links using Hotmail; and Private, which allows you to surf the web without leaving traces.

Stay safe

The Safety Center in Bing Bar gives you peace of mind when browsing, checking that your browser security settings aren't compromising your privacy or leaving vulnerable to attacks.

On the negative side, Bing Bar is very United States-centric. If you live outside of the US then you may not be interested in a lot of the content in the News and Sports tools. We also got a bit annoyed that search terms disappear from Bing Bar when you open a new tab in the browser.

All in all, Bing Bar is a nice looking, practical browser enhancement that can help you find things online much quicker.

Download Bing Bar 5.0.1423.0 in Softonic

Simple is definitely one of the best ways to describe SpeedyFox, a one-window, no options tool to optimize the performance of Firefox. SpeedyFox claims to speed up Firefox by defragmenting its SQLITE databases. It says that these databases get out of shape over time, slowing down start-up and delaying operations with cookies and history.

When you open SpeedyFox, you are presented with a single window. You chose the Firefox profile you want to modify, its location and press the Speed Up My Firefox! button. A few seconds later, your Firefox is declared optimized - it couldn't be simpler! Firefox must be closed while SpeedyFox is working its magic, and the makers of the program assure that it doesn't interfere with your private data.

SpeedyFox isn't going to revolutionize your life, but it did shave a few seconds off start up time. Unfortunately, there's no actual evidence of what it has done or where. It describes the process briefly on the SpeedyFox website, but other than that, we just have to take the manufacturer's word for it.

Many people dogged by a slow Firefox will want to throw everything they have at the problem, while those who like a bit more substance to their tools will probably be more wary. The choice is yours…

What it does and how is a little unclear, but SpeedyFox will make Firefox just that little bit quicker.

Download SpeedyFox 1.6 in Softonic

Simply install Vista-aero Theme and select it from the Tools - Add-ons menu in Firefox, and you'll be able to tweak the browser's interface so that it perfectly matches the Vista design.

In fact, Vista-aero Theme actually uses IE8 buttons, which suits Firefox very well. One thing we didn't like about Vista-aero Theme, however, was having all those extra Favorite buttons on the tab bar and not being able to remove them.

Vista-aero Theme - an IE8-like theme with Vista Aero style!

Download Vista-aero Theme 3.0.0.91 in Softonic

FlashGot is a free Mozilla Firefox (and Thunderbird) extension that's designed for people who do a lot of downloading. It can handle large numbers of batch downloads with its own download manager. This simple but powerful plugin can even handle batch downloads for many anonymous or redirected download link services such as depositfiles.com, fileserve.com, filesonic.com, hotfile.com, megaupload.com, netload.in, rapidshare.com, uploading.com, uploaded.to, ul.to, zshare.com.

FlashGot is very easy to use, and has lots of customization options that means you'll be able to tweak it just to your liking - you can modify everything from what action takes place when you click a link to what options appear in the FlashGot menu. It also supports a vast number of download managers, which means that you can continue to use favorites like IDM and DAP.

No more clicking multiple links and "Save as" - FlashGot simply scans the page for downloadable links and then you select which ones you need.

Download FlashGot 1.3.8 in Softonic

Stylish is a Firefox add-on that makes the whole task much easier. It allows you to chose user styles and themes from the Userstyles website and install them directly. The styles allow you to change the appearance of websites, like as changing themes and skins for sites such as Google, Facebook and YouTube. When you open a style on the website, you'll see the option Install with Stylish. This opens a window where you can see what websites the style will affect, preview it and even customize it yourself. This editing will take a little technical knowledge.

If you access Stylish via the Tools > Add-ons window, you'll see that the add-on has added a new section. This will allow you to directly visit the Stylish website, write your own style or check if a Stylish update is available. Obviously, writing your own also takes technical know-how, but there's absolutely no obligation to do the creative part yourself. The styles available on the website are many and varied - obviously, some are more user-friendly than others, but if you have a look around, you're sure to find plenty to suit.

Stylish will help you use and create fun user styles, whether you're experienced or not!

Download Stylish Firefox 1.2.4 in Softonic

This handy Firefox extension detects and downloads video clips embedded on websites like YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe or Dailymotion, among others. You can check the number of detected videos on the extension's icon, in the bottom right corner of the browser's window. Then simply click on this icon to open the extension's interface.

NetVideoHunter will display all the detected videos on a list, where you can choose to play them in the program's built-in player or download them straight away. Videos are downloaded in their native FLV format, so you'll need a third-party app to play them – or convert them.

With the NetVideoHunter extension you can download embedded video files from the most popular video sharing sites.

Download NetVideoHunter 1.9.1 in Softonic

It's not uncommon for people to search out how-to videos on the web when you want to learn how to make something. Maybe you want to learn how to knit. Maybe you're interested in trying your hand at your favorite restaurant dish. Whatever the case, YouTube's a great resource for finding video tutorials.

How do you know the tutorial's any good though? That's where FreeTwitTube comes in.

FreeTwitTube is a neat little program that will collect tweets from Twitter users referencing the video you're viewing. It works with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome and shows up directly on the program page of the video you're viewing on YouTube. You can even respond to the comments via the webpage if you're already signed into your own Twitter account.

Unfortunately, FreeTwitTube relies on people actually having commented on the video in question in order to be an effective service. If no one comments, there's nothing FreeTwitTube can provide by way of Twitter comments. FreeTwitTube's icon is also initially a little difficult to locate since it's very small on an already relatively busy-looking webpage.

FreeTwitTube is a great resource for people who want to know others' opinions on the YouTube videos they're watching.

Download FreeTwitTube in Softonic

After a quick installation – just like any other Firefox extension – Social Fixer displays a quick start guide overlaid on top of your Facebook account. You can see the changes immediately: a new button bar, wall messages organized by tabs, and a new button in the top right corner with the options to configure Social Fixer.

Though it seems a bit overwhelming at first, if you spend the necessary amount of time to configure Social Fixer properly you can customize almost every single detail on Facebook. Too bad the font resizing feature seemed to work for certain pages on Facebook, but not for the whole site.

Generally speaking, Social Fixer makes the site a lot more flexible and easier to browse, thanks to the dozens of filters and options included in the extension. The only problem is that learning to use all of them requires some time!

Social Fixer is a Firefox extension that helps you customize Facebook and make it easier to navigate.

Download Social Fixer (previously Better Facebook) 6.22 in Softonic