Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

Firefox as a browser isn’t necessarily that much better than anything else. Safari’s good, as are Opera and Chrome. What really makes Firefox shine, and sets it apart from the other browsers for the time being, is the extensions.

You’ve seen the iPhone commercials, where it’s like, “you want to find a great restaurant nearby? There’s an app for that.” Firefox is the same, but instead, there’s an extension for that.

Saving time doing annoyingly complicated things? Here are three Firefox extensions for that.

SkipScreen

There are a bunch of sites on the Web that get a ton of download traffic, and they’re among the few places where most people send and store files on the Web – Rapidshare, ZShare, MegaUpload, and the like. They’re all easy to upload to, and a huge pain to download from. To download something from ZShare, for instance, you have to click about 8 times (but without waiting too long, or it goes away), close popups, spin in circles, and do chicken impressions.

SkipScreen gets rid of all that. It works in all the major download sites, and it does all the steps instantly for you – all you do is click “Download” the first time, and then choose somewhere to save the file. SkipScreen does the rest – literally saves me a few minutes every time I try to download something.

FastDial

Most of the time I’m online is spent doing only a few things: blogging-related stuff, news reading, and the random fun stuff that I love wasting my time on. Fast Dial is the perfect Firefox Extension for people like me – every time you open a new window or tab, it displays a few websites of your choice. Now, I’ve got one-click access to all the websites I use most often.

You can change how many sites are shown on the page, or when the Fast Dial page shows up (new tabs, new windows, etc.) It’s like having a super-easy, thumbnail-generating bookmark bar available all the time.

GCal Popup

Without my calendar, I’d be done. I’m not sure I’d remember to brush my teeth if it wasn’t in my calendar, but thanks to GCal Popup I don’t have to find out. Once installed, GCal Popup lives in the bottom right corner of Firefox, and can be opened on top of any window with one click. Add, view, or edit your events, and then one click closes your calendar and lets you go right back to the page you were on.

GCal Popup saves me from going back and forth to my calendar, and keeping another tab open at all times. It’s easy to open, easy to close, and simple and stable to use.

With these three extensions (SkipScreen in particular is a sanity-saver), Firefox saves me tons of time and effort while I’m browsing the Web. Certain things about the Web aren’t as simple or easy as they could be- thankfully, there’s an app for that.

What saves you time and effort on the Web?

Photo: macrorain