These are the navigation extensions I currently use, for later reference…

Firefox has memory leaks. You need to restart it once in a while. That’s a drag, because you’ll lose all the tabs you still had to read. Enter [[Session Manager

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324]], which saves the state of your tabs and restores them when you restart. The default behaviour is to only restore after crashing, so don’t forget to customise in Tools->Session Manager.

Keyboard navigation:

I love my keyboard. Mice are mostly designed for leisurly tasks. Some day I’ll write a post on user interfaces. And I love Vim. It’s the only editor I use, all the time. So naturally when I found [[Vimperator|https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/4891]], a plugin that makes Firefox behave like Vim, I was happy. The plugin still has some rough edges, but it’s fantastic, it’s really the best thing since Hit-a-Hint (see further).

I also use [[mozex

http://mozex.mozdev.org/]] lets you set external programs for some actions. In particular, this lets you set a shortcut to edit a form’s textarea with the editor of your choice (Vim is of course mine). Alleluia!

I used to use those extensions as well, but they are pretty much all obsoleted by Vimperator:

[[Hit a Hint

http://hah.mozdev.org/]]: select a link with your keyboard. In the process, find hidden links that you’d never see with your mouse. HaH suggests another extention named surfkey, which I’m not fond of. YMMV.

[[Keyconfig

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=72994]]: Change keys. With [[Functions for keyconfig

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1537]], you can now use your keyboard properly, and have h,j,k,l navigate in the page.

A note to Firefox developers: get all the plugins to be configured the same way, will ya? Some create a menu entry in Tools, others are configured through the plug-in manager… it’s a mess!