Off the clock: The Ultimate Porn Surfing Firefox Add-ons

A lot of people use the Internet to find porn.

A lot of people use Firefox (go download Firefox 3.6!)

In fact, I'd go as far to suggest that porn surfers -- or at least the search for naughty, illicit, adult-only material -- account for Firefox's biggest market demographic. The 'young' Internet -- blogs, social networks, porn -- is predominantly ruled by the spotty teenagers of the browser world: Firefox and Chrome. Internet Explorer's total market share is larger, but corporations, geriatrics and aging family computers -- i.e. the non-porn world -- account for most of that.

I'm not expecting you to raise your hand or even nod your agreement, but let's face it: most of us, at some time or another, will search for porn. It makes sense to be prepared for such an eventuality -- I think we all know the perils of loud, auto-playing sex music or aggressive pop-ups of hairy, German MILFs that just. won't. close.

Note: all of the links in this feature are safe. Don't worry: you should be fine to read this at work.

Safe surfing -- of any variety, be it pornographic or not -- usually covers 3 areas:

• Navigation -- this deals with getting around quickly and easily. Elimination of pop-ups, moving around your tabs quickly, finding the stuff you want quickly and painlessly, that kind of thing.
• Downloading -- where do you download the files? Are the files you download safe? How about streaming Flash videos, can we save those to the hard disk?
• Security & Privacy -- those darn pesky temporary internet files and cookies! Covering your tracks, basically -- though I'm going to assume you're trying to surf from home, not from the office... or the library... (pervs!)

Navigation
I'm starting with this one first because it helps you get at the pr0n easier and faster. Without pushing the boundaries of decency, I think I can speak for all of us when I say there's nothing worse than slow porn.

I'm just going to list add-ons and tips/tricks, I hope that's enough -- I was hoping illustrative diagrams wouldn't be required...

• Alert Box Blocker -- AlertCheck lets you escape infinite loops of those pesky pop-up boxes.
• Link Manipulation -- Linky lets you do a lot more with standard links. It adds a little menu every time you right-click a link -- from there you can open every image or link on the current page in a new tab, or window! Neat.
• Quick Access & Verification -- there's nothing worse than hitting a slow-loading link only to find out that the contents are, well, low quality. Thumbs is an add-on that gives you a thumbnail preview when you hover over links. There are also experimental add-ons like Image Viewer that simply show you all the photos on the page without the fluff.
• 'Gallery Hacks' -- there are some neat add-ons that just move sequentially through similarly-named images -- HOTMILF01, HOTMILF02, etc. -- URL Flipper just increments and decrements through the URL, while Firefusk actually creates a gallery for you.

Downloading
Ah, the 'meat' of this feature! Sometimes you don't want to click through slow, ad-ridden websites to get at all the good bits -- sometimes you just want to push a button, let an add-on do all of the 'hard work', and then come back when everything is ready for you to just... dive in.

• Download Manager -- looking at the 'downloaded' figure -- 34 million! -- I bet most of you already have DownThemAll! installed. If you haven't, you should! It does a lot of things, but most importantly, for porn-surfing, it lets you download every image (or link) on a particular page.
• Sorting Downloads -- Download Sort lets you set up predefined locations for different file types. This one's useful even if you're not surfing nefarious content: you could set up a directory for EXEs and ZIPs, and another for images, movies, etc.
• Download Streaming Videos -- unless you've been under a rock for the last few years, you've probably noticed that a lot of adult-only Internet content has moved towards streaming. Pushed along by YouTube and every other on-demand streaming service, patience is no longer a virtue: we want our our multimedia now dammit. But... after you've finished watching the video, why not save it? It's sitting on your computer, it just has to be saved to a FLV file! That's where Video DownloadHelper comes in. You'll need a video player like VLC to watch the FLV files.

Security & Privacy
Firefox is pretty good when it comes to intrinsic privacy. You should start by using 'Private Browsing' -- Tools>Start Private Browsing, or hit Ctrl-Shift-P (for 'porn', obviously). When you do this, all of your other tabs are whisked away and you're presented with a new Firefox window -- when you next open Firefox, your old (pre-private session) tabs will be restored. It's not as smooth as Chrome, but it works!

Then, grab these add-ons:

• Ad-Blockers -- I think it goes without saying, but adult-oriented sites are usually full-to-overflowing with adverts. Get AdBlock Plus and Flashblock.
• Better Privacy -- I'm not sure if Firefox's Private Browsing actually eliminates the 'Flash cookies' that are becoming more and more popular on the Internet. BetterPrivacy makes sure you're really private -- but read the warnings first: using this add-on will interfere with some sites, so be careful!
• Browse With Ultimate Anonymity -- if you don't know what Tor is, don't worry -- but basically, it's a network that lets you surf the Internet very, very anonymously. At the push of a button, Torbutton lets you surf from behind the mega-proxy of Tor. There's also the option to use other proxies, if you can't make Tor work for whatever reason -- some Internet services might not work with 'Tor Mode' enabled, so bear that in mind.

As a final note, remember that Firefox itself has some pretty powerful options! You can disable JavaScript (Tools>Options>Content), or even control what JavaScript has permission to do. You can prevent automatic window resizing, which is pretty annoying when you're trying to click on a nipple.

For more add-ons, and even some handy (and surprisingly powerful!) bookmarklets for page manipulation, check out Pornzilla -- an entire project dedicated to porn surfing in Firefox. And of course, if you have a tip or add-on that I've missed, leave a comment!

Tags: add-on, ads, adult, download, extension, firefox, images, lists, plugin, porn, privacy, security, tor, video