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First, if you haven’t upgraded yet, Firefox 2.0 is out. It’s a quick and easy download and will update itself from that point on. Some of the new treats include a spell checker, faster speeds, and an improved rss handler.

Second, if you’re using Firefox to avoid viruses (and for the spellchecking), that’s great, but you might be missing some of the best add-ons. My list includes:

Adblock – blocks ads from websites and makes the web a much more pleasant place. The drawback: you have to pick the ads. The fix…

Adblock Filterset.G – gives Adblock a huge list of ads to block and updates itself every time I open firefox

BugMeNot – lets me log in to free sites that require a login (like the New York Times) by right clicking and clicking “login with bugmenot.” Others have signed up with fake email addresses so I don’t have to.

Customize Google – tons of google choices, but my favorites are secure gmail and “Google suggests” from the search box as I type

easyGestures – lets little mouse gestures control the browser. (Pretty geeky)

Google Calendar Notifier – unobtrusively pops up in the lower right hand corner whenever I have an event on my calendar (they text message me too)

Google Send to Phone – highlight any text on a page, click send to phone and you have a text message. Very useful for addresses and directions. (they haven’t upgraded it to 2.0 yet!)

Viamatic FoXpose – shows me a snapshot of all of my tabs (when I remember it’s there)

For web development:

FireBug – javascript debugger. Yuck. Javascript.

ColorZilla – tells me the web color for any color on any page (web colors look like #6685AF)

IE View – opens any page in internet explorer so I can remember why it’s such a pain

Web Developer – lets me look at a page from many angles. My favorite use is to highlight a little text and clicking “View Selection Source” to see the html for a part of a page

Internet Exploder 7 just came out too. Reports say it’s much better than Explorer 6, but I’m keeping 6 so I can keep testing ShackPrices on it. If you don’t want Firefox, for security’s sake you should at least upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.