5 useful firefox extensions for torrent freaks
Firefox is a great torrent browser. But you have to extend firefox a little to get the best out of it. Here a some extensions I found useful, they make browsing and searching torrents even more fun.
1. Torrent Search Plugins
Let’s start with the “search engine box”. It’s not really an extension, but it does extend firefox. The search box is located at the top right corner in firefox, by default you can search google and a couple of other sites.
There are a lot of useful torrent search plugins available for Firefox. This makes searching torrents a lot easier. You don’t have to browse every site, just put your keyword in the search box and go. If the results on a particular site are not satisfying, just select another one and hit go.
I have bundled Firefox search plugins for the most popular sites in a simple installer. So if you want to add some nice torrent search plugins, take a look over here. You can select the plugins for your favorite site, or just install them all.
2. Blocking popups
A lot of torrent sites use extremely annoying popups. It pays the bills probably, but I won’t click on them anyway so let’s get rid of them.
Firefox blocks a lot of popups by default, but lately more and more are getting trough. So it’s wise to install the adblock extension.
Just add the url of the popup in to the configuration window of the adblock extension and you’re clean!
3. Speed things up
Torrent sites are in general the slowest loading sites out there (bottom 5%). An easy way to speed things up a little is by using the fasterfox extension. Fasterfox prefetches links and optimizes network and rendering settings. On top of this it also blocks flash initiated popups. A must have.
4. Customize torrent sites
The great advantage that Firefox has compared to for example IE is that it is far more customizable. The Greasemonkey extension is a great example of extreme customization. Greasemonkey allows you to install all kinds of useful user scripts so you can customize the web to your own needs (in a sense).
Some of my favorite, torrent related scripts are:
Imdb torrent linker
Last.fm torrent linker
Remove crap from Torrentspy
Hide seedless torrents on Piratebay
It is not even that hard to edit those scripts to your own needs, or create scripts of your own. This excellent site has a nice overview of things you can do with Greasemonkey, and more important, how to.
5. Remove it permanently
Last but not least we’re going to remove all the banners and other crap from websites. Give you’re eyes some rest by using the “remove it permanently” extension. This extension allows you to remove all unwanted content from a webpage. Just check out some of the examples over here.
