I spent some time today playing with some awesome extensions for the Firefox browser, and I thought I'd share. Abandon all hope of cool points if you continue reading: this one's for the nerds.

Note: These tips are aimed at Windows users because not all these add ons will work on your Mac.

First of all I should warn you, if you're my friend and I find out you're still using Internet Explorer, you must switch. More and more, the best junk on the web is being built for browsers that support standards and are upgraded frequently enough to keep up with the latest trends. Off the top of my head, HTML 5 and Google Wave are two emerging techs that IE just can't handle yet. My advice? Get Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. They're all free and only take a couple of minutes to set up. If you value our friendship you'll do it. Seriously.

One of the coolest things about Firefox is that it supports browser plug ins that can either add to or refine its functionality or change its appearance. I found a couple new favorites this morning I want to tell you about.

• delicious bookmarks - At the suggestion of a co-worker, I installed this one (a move that sent me down this yellow-brick road of Firefox add ons), and I was blown away. It integrates the browser with the delicious social bookmarking service. It lets you add a delicious toolbar to the top of your viewport, and I've completely replaced my bookmarks toolbar with it.
  
  The biggest advantage (besides the intrinsic organizational advantages of tagging bookmarks by topic) of doing this is that you'll be able to synchronize your bookmarks with any installation of Firefox. I've tried a couple other bookmark syncing tools (xmarks and Google sync, specifically), and this one is the best solution.
• Personal Menu - This is my first of three add ons that conserve your screen real estate. When you install Personal Menu, it lets you condense the Menus toolbar (the one that goes File, Edit, View etc.) into a couple of icons on your Navigation bar. Then you can turn off the Menus bar and get that extra screen space. Totally useful.
• Hide Caption Titlebar Plus - This gets rid of the very top bar of the browser and moves the Minimize, Maximize, Close icons to the end of the Navigation bar. Another bit of screen real estate conserved. This is an experimental add on so you should be aware that it might be buggy.
• Tabs on Top - Just like it says, this moves the Tabs bar to the top of the window. Not really conserving any space here, but it makes the use of space seem more logical. Instead of a blank bar hanging down into your viewport, the blank bar is at the top of the screen. Does my heart good. Another experimental add on: tread lightly!

So there are a few suggestions for pimping your Firefox. I have a million of them so stay tuned.