So, you’ve been taken in by my endless praising of the Firefox browser. Or, you found it on your own and decided to give it a spin. However it happened, you finally made the plunge and installed the greatest browser ever. Now you need to know how to use it. Fear not, the answers are on the way.

New software can be a scary proposition. Even I get nervous when installing something for the first time. The questions race through your mind: “Is it going to work?” “Will I understand how to use it?” “Will there be evil gremlins who jump out of my monitor and bite me?” We all have these questions when facing a freshly installed program for the first time.

When it comes to Firefox, the best thing to do is explore a bit. It’s Open Source software, so you aren’t going to get in trouble; Mozilla (unlike the manufacturers of certain other popular browsers, who shall remain nameless) won’t come knocking at your door because you took a peek under the hood. Firefox comes with a bunch of amazing features built-in, as well as the possibly for endless new features through extensions (or “addons”). My goal today is to introduce you to some of the neat features built in to Firefox, as well as a few extensions I think are important for newbies. There are thousands of extensions available through Mozilla, and probably an equal number — if not more — available from other developers.

I’m not going to go into all the features of Firefox here; there are things like increased security and cross-platform compatibility that I could preach on for hours, but I’m going to spare you guys that and just hit the highlights.

I think the biggest seller for Firefox is tabbed browsing; however, by default you might not notice Firefox provides tabs. Under the “File” menu, you’ll find an entry for “New Tab.” Click that and you’ll get a tab-bar, and will be able to switch between pages. No more needing an extra browser window to work on multiple pages. (You can set the tab-bar as always visible in the preferences menu.) I personally have a half-dozen tabs that I keep open all the time, and then open more as I need to. (I have an extension that lets me have multiple rows of tabs; the most I’ve ever had is six rows of twelve tabs each. But, that’s something for another post.)

Also helpful is the restore tab function. If you accidentally close a tab before you’re finished with it, you can go to “History” and then “Recently Closed Tabs” to see a list of, surprise, your recently closed tabs. Click on any of them and they’ll reopen themselves where they were before you closed them. I use this feature at least twenty times a day.

Along with the tab restore is the built-in session restore. If your browser crashes, or if you close it accidentally, your previous session will be saved, and you can reload it when you open the browser. (I can’t remember if it does this automatically, or if that’s a setting I have turned on. Check in the “preferences” menu.) If Firefox thinks your previous session might have caused a crash, it will ask you if you want to reload the previous session, or start a new one.

Live bookmarks are another great feature in Firefox. Most of us are familiar with bookmarks (or “favorites” in that other browser), where you save pages you want to be able to find again in the future. Live bookmarks, however, work with RSS feeds to provide constantly updated pages. (See the little orange box up in the address bar? That’s for a feed of all the content on the site.) If you have certain sites you check regularly, you can set a live bookmark with Firefox, and have all the updates to the site show up in your Live Bookmarks folder. (If you get really into RSS, you’ll probably get too many feeds to handle comfortably with Live Bookmarks. At that point, you’ll probably want to consider one of the RSS reader extensions for FF, or a stand-alone feed reader.)

The best part of Firefox, though, are the extensions. There are extensions to do literally just about anything, and you can search for then at the Mozilla Addons page. (You’ll also find themes there, if you don’t like the default look.) Just put in a keyword related to what you want an extension to do — for example, “gmail” if you’re looking for extensions that enhance Google’s Gmail service — and if there is one, it’ll come up. They’re self-installing, too, so no messy code to play with. You can also search for extensions on the web, though you should be careful that they come from reliable sources. (By default, Firefox will prevent you from installing extensions from any source besides the official Mozilla page. You’ll get an “information bar” pop-up with instructions for how to add other sites to your safe list if that happens.)

My recommended extensions for the beginning Firefox user are:

Adblock: Allows you to block annoying ads on websites. Just right click on the ad and select “Adblock Image.”

Advanced technique: When you click to block an ad, a box comes up showing the address of the ad. You can replace the specific ad URL with the ‘*’ wildcard character to block any image from a given site. For example, if you try to adblock the main Wisebread logo, the URL is “http://www.wisebread.com/files/wisebread/wisebread-logo.jpg.” If you select “Okay,” you’ll block that image, but only that image. If, instead, you change the URL to read “http://www.wisebread.com/files/*” you would block all images from Wisebread. This is very helpful for large, popular ad-servers where there are thousands of URLs; if you wildcard the site that serves the ads, you’ll eliminate all ads, instead of having to block each one individually.

Finjan SecureBrowsing: Warns you about potential unsafe content at a destination page before you click the link. Other services (like WOT, below) use a database of user reports to suggest unsafe content; Finjan actually scans the destination page in real-time, each time the link is displayed on a page you’re viewing.

The red “x” symbol designates a possible threat. The green checkmark designates the page is safe. A brown question mark indicates the page could not be scanned.

Forecastfox: If you’re a weather nut, ForecastFox gives you the current weather in the statusbar for whatever location you specify. Also, notifies you of severe weather alerts.

Secure Login: Protects your passwords by preventing them from being autocompleted. Autocomplete is great, but if your password is accidentally autocompleted on a malicious site, it can be stolen. Secure Login prevents this, instead providing a gold key icon on the statusbar. Once you’re sure you’re at a legit site, you click the key and your username and password are autocompleted for you.

WOT: Browser security. Adds colored icons beside links to indicate trustworthiness. Uses a database of user reports in order to warn you of potentially unsafe sites. While Finjan (above) scans the page for malicious code that might harm your system, WOT provides information like reliability as a business partner, security of private information, and safeness for children.

The green check on the left is the result of Finjan’ss scan. The green circle on the right indicates a positive review in WOT’s database. The circle also appears orange and red as the reviews grow less positive.

Now, there are thousands of other great options out there. There are extensions for developing webpages, for checking your email, keeping track of stock prices, tracking AdSense earnings, showing the time in anywhere in the world, making your tabs turn different colors, and just about everything else you could imagine. These just happen to be a select few I think are important/useful for the average new user in the Firefox world.

If you’re an established Firefox user, tell us what extensions you use, and what features you love. If you’re a newbie, tell us what drew you to Firefox, and feel free to ask about features you’re unsure of or extensions you wish you could find.

Note: All screenshots were taken by Justin Ryan in Firefox running on Ubuntu 7.04. Windows users may experience slightly different views.