10 Firefox add-ons that porn fiends love | TechRadar

Yes, it's true, porn addicts may have somewhat 'specialist' tastes. But when it comes to Firefox, they want much the same as the rest of us: great search tools, professional security, faster and easier downloads, and improved browsing privacy. They really just need these 10 top Firefox extensions, in fact - and so do you.

1. Protect your PC from malware

Browse Google images and your results are split into blocks of 21. But use CoolIris and you'll get all your results displayed on a 3D photo wall, a much faster and easier way to find the images you need. It only works with some sites, unfortunately, but as these include Google, Flickr, Picasa, Yahoo!, Photobucket, Facebook and MySpace then you'll still have plenty to browse. Especially as it searches and displays YouTube videos, too. Give it a try.

Sometimes your image searches will lead you to forums or websites with large thumbnail galleries. You could do the right-click "open link in new tab" thing for every thumbnail, but it's much easier to use Linky. Just select the thumbnails you want to view, right-click an empty part of the page, and click Linky > Open All Image Links In Tabs to open them automatically. A real time-saver.

Organising your images is easy. Videos? That's more of a challenge, but YouPlayer can help, at least with the big sites (YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and Metacafe). Drag and drop video links into the playlist and you can play them in your sidebar, without having to revisit the original site each time. It can download videos, too, but if that's your main interest then we'd recommend a more specialist tool like Video DownloadHelper.

Porn sites used to be renowned for bombarding you with popups and banner ads, but now it's common practice just about everywhere. Fortunately Adblock Plus will block just about everything, saving you time and ensuring you only download the content you need. It can take a little while to set this extension up to suit your requirements, though, so it pays to spend a few minutes reading the documentation at adblockplus.org before you start.

When you're downloading several large files then it can be annoying to keep switching to the download window to see how they're progressing. But there is another way. Install the Download Status Bar and every download generates a new button on the status bar, so it's visible whatever tab you happen to be using. Each button includes a progress bar for easy download monitoring, and you can right-click the button for options to pause or cancel the download.

It's always the same. No sooner are you checking out a website you really shouldn't, when your boss/ partner/ some other random annoying person turns up and shows great interest in exactly what you're doing. The solution? Install hideBad. Press the customisable hotkey and it'll close your current tabs, then optionally delete your history, cookies and more. But don't worry - once they've gone the previous tabs may be recovered and you can carry on where you left off.

Mike is a lead security reviewer at Future, where he stress-tests VPNs, antivirus and more to find out which services are sure to keep you safe, and which are best avoided. Mike began his career as a lead software developer in the engineering world, where his creations were used by big-name companies from Rolls Royce to British Nuclear Fuels and British Aerospace. The early PC viruses caught Mike's attention, and he developed an interest in analyzing malware, and learning the low-level technical details of how Windows and network security work under the hood.