One of the great things about Firefox is its support for extensions. Sure… security, speed, and standards compliance are all great reasons to use Mozilla’s web browser, too. But the extensions available really set Firefox apart from just about every other web browser out there.

Regardless of the type of web surfer you are, there are bound to be Firefox extensions tailored to your habits. For those of us who spend a lot of time using search engines, building websites, or otherwise working on the Internet, there are a lot of ways to turn Firefox into more than just another web browser.

What follows is a brief overview of some of my favorite SEO / webmastering extensions. If I’ve missed one that you find useful, drop me a message and I’ll give it a spin.

EXTENSIONS FOR SEO

Customize Google

Customize Google is basically an advanced options extension that lets you turn features off/on, add features and abilities that don’t naturally exist in Google services, and otherwise make Google all your own. It gives you the ability to reroute Google Image results directly to images, add customized filters, and places links to other search engines at the top of the Google SERPs (my favorite feature - see below).

SearchStatus

SearchStatus puts several valuable tools right at your fingertips. Handy readouts of Google PageRank and Alexa rank (however useless) appear in the status area of the browser. A right click menu really shows off what this tool can do, though. Included in the array of tools is a Link Report (that shows incoming & outgoing link counts, nofollow’d, and secure links), a quick readout of all Meta data, a keyword density report, and quick links to robots.txt, whois, indexed pages in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and “backward links”.

SEO For Firefox

SEO For Firefox has two main features that I like. The first one is its ability to pull additional information into search results pages. An integrated bar beneath each search result will tell you, among other things, the PR, age, linkage, del.icio.us, Technorati, Dmoz, Alexa, and Bloglines information for that site. A quick link to whois data is also provided. But since I use another extension to display that information in the SERPs, I keep SEO For Firefox around because of the handy Lookup Tool. It allows you to enter any website to grab all of the information above… and then some. It’s very handy for getting a “searchy” snapshot of any site.

SeoQuake

Like SEO For Firefox, SeoQuake pulls additional information into your search results pages on all of the major search engines. SeoQuake gives you more options for customization, though. It allows you to choose from a wide variety of information that includes everything in SEO For Firefox, plus: Digg index, keyword lookup, robots.txt, links, and information from additional search engines. It changes the way your SERPs look in a much more dramatic way than SEO For Firefox, though. In fact, I can see a lot of people being turned off by the drastic changes that are made.

That being said, I love the fact that it allows you to manually populate the information (so it doesn’t slow down the SERP load time when you’re just searching for kicks), save the information to a file, append the information to an existing file, and save snapshots of the search results in an archive.

In addition, SeoQuake has an optional transparent “Seobar” that floats in the top left corner of the screen and can be expanded while you’re viewing any site on the web. The Seobar includes the same information that the plugin adds to the SERPs so it makes grabbing that information without having to do a search very easy. And since you can pick and choose which parameters and which bits of information appear in each of SeoQuakes output modes (inline SERPs, Seobar, etc), it was by far the most customizable extension I tried.

EXTENSIONS FOR WEBMASTERS

Firebug

Firebug really fits under both SEO & webmaster extensions. Firebug can tell you so much about a website that it’d be easy for me to write an entire post dedicated to it alone. Firebug lets you inspect any sites’ HTML, CSS, Meta information, JavaScript, DOM, and practically any other element that makes up a site. It also displays handy graphs that show the load time for different elements on the site. This information is helpful for optimizing code, load times, and tweaks. It lets you make adjustments to the existing code for a site and preview the changes before you publish them.

IE Tab

Some folks don’t like the idea behind IE Tab - it opens websites inside Firefox using IE’s rendering engine. Because this is possible, some fear that website owners won’t work on standards compliance as much as they should. If you can switch rendering engines on the fly, why bother building websites that aren’t dependent on IE? Regardless, IE Tab is a great way to check your website for cross-browser compatibly without having to fire up Internet Explore.

Web Developer

Web Developer adds a hideable bar to Firefox that puts a TON of information right in front of you. Cookies, CSS, Forms, Images, Information, Miscellaneous, Outline, Resize, Tools, Source, and Options will appear above the browser window and drop-menus from each one let you do, see, and tweak almost every aspect of your site. The Outline tool, for example, draws different colored boxes around whatever elements you choose (headings, tables, frames, etc.). The Information button lets you view just about every setting and attribute you can think of. Resize will show you what your site will look like at different monitor resolutions while the Tools menu hooks you up with all sorts of single-click validation services. If I had to pick my favorite of these extensions, it’d be this one! I could write about what Web Developer does all day and still probably miss something.

There are probably quite a few more extensions that I could have written about. But the fact is, these are the ones that I use. In fact, Patrick Schaber beat me to the punch and has posted a list with several extensions that I’ve not tried. Give them all a look and watch in wonder as your simple web browser transforms itself into a lean, mean SEO and website building machine.