The official Firefox Add-Ons page lists thousands of browser extensions, sorted by category and organized into collections, for customizing your browsing experience. The Reference Desk is one such collection that includes thirteen add-ons to help students and researches sort and organize data.

If you’ve never tried mind mapping as a brainstorming tool, the free version of Mind Meister is a great place to start. Mind Meister is an online tool used in a browser, but your maps can be published to any website or exported as an image or PDF. Although you are limited to just six mind maps in the free version, teachers and students can upgrade to the Academic version for just $15 a year.

When first released, one of Firefox’s defining features was tabs, so multiple websites can be viewed in multiple tabs instead of multiple windows. When you right-click on a link in Firefox, however, the Open Link in New Window option is still there right above the Open Link in New Tab. For users speed clicking their way through the options, one small slip of the mouse can give you a new window instead of a new tab. But for die-hard tab users, there is a way to remove the New Window option from the Firefox right click. Mark O’Neill of MakeUseOf.com explains how.

If you are using a modern browser such as Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, or Safari you might have noticed an orange (or blue) RSS icon in the upper right-hand corner of many websites, such as my Jokes By Kidssite. If the site owner has added the appropriate RSS autodiscovery code to their site, you can quickly add their RSS feed to your favorite feed reader by clicking on the RSS icon in the address bar. This saves you the trouble of searching through their site for an RSS link. If you have a website, learn how to add this special code to your own site at PeteFrietag.com.

Chrome is a new browser from Google, built to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Why bother with a new browser if you already have one that works? Google explains that Chrome was built from the ground up to be faster, more secure, more stable and better equipped to handle today’s demanding web-based applications. Learn more with this official Google Chrome comic book.

Because it is so much more efficient to keep your hands on the computer keyboard (and skip any extraneous mouse usage), any time you spend memorizing a few keyboard shortcuts will end up saving you a lot of time. This About.com page has a nice collection of Firefox shortcuts. For example, use ALT-D to jump to the address bar and highlight the current contents. Simply start typing to overwrite the existing location.

Although the history functions of Firefox and Internet Explorer are not perfect, they do offer some settings to allow customization. Firefox lets you tweak the number of days history is kept, whether to remember data entered in forms, and whether to track downloads. Internet Explorer also lets you set the days history is kept, and how much disk space is allocated to history. For more details on how to change these options, read CNET’s Worker’s Edge.

Two ways to keep your browser’s search history private are to turn off auto-complete (also called auto-fill) and to clear your search history. Google provides step-by-step instructions for three popular browsers, and Leo Notenboom tackles the problem with plenty of screenshots.

For the back-to-school season, Mozilla has created a Campus Edition of Firefox bundled with three pre-installed plugins aimed at students. FoxyTunes lets you control your music player within the browser. Zotero collects and manages research citations. StumbleUpon introduces you to new websites based on your interests. If, you already have Firefox, you should download the plugins individually instead of getting the bundle.

Although it is my favorite browser, when left in its default configuration, Firefox often mangles the size of popup windows (so that some of the content is hidden) and disables manual resizing of the offending window. To change this, type “about:config” in the Firefox address bar. Then filter the results to “dom.disable” and scroll down to “dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable”. Click on this entry to change the value to “true.” For a video demo, visit AllBusiness.