Firefox toolbar buttons lovers rejoice. Now every single function you used to look for in the menus are now or can be available via buttons with Custom Buttons, a powerful Firefox extension that doesn’t add any button per se but allows to customize your toolbar by adding a large number of buttons people is rabidly developing for the most useful and creative functions there.

Ranging from the classic increase/decrease/reset text size button, to a revamped new tab button that can open a blank tab, with your homepage or with the currently opened tab.

Due to its nature, Custom Buttons can actually do very powerful tricks like changing your User Agent, so Firefox may identify itself as other browser and fool badly coded web sites, there is a button that lists all tabs currently opened (this feature will be available in Firefox 2), one for launching the current web page in either Internet Explorer, Opera or Maxthon, and a very long etc. that were previously available only as extensions now can be installed with a single click and no restart necessary.

Zoolcar9, has a nice compilation of buttons created by him and other people at the mozillaZine forums. Once you install Custom Buttons, visit Zoolcar9′s web page (or save it and import it to your bookmarks) and just click some links to add buttons. Then select View/Toolbars/Customize… and drag buttons to your toolbar at will. To delete a button, just right click on it and select Delete.

New buttons are conveniently available as simple web links that use the custombuttons:// pseudo-protocol, an implementation that may rise some eyebrows. I would prefer to see this implemented as a JavaScript function like the .addSearchEngine method which will still allow buttons to be made available as simple links. A big benefit of having buttons as links is that you can bookmark them as well and take them around if you are using a roaming bookmarks service such as Foxmarks and restore them at will.

This is a nice meta-extension, as it really doesn’t do much for itself but allows further customization in the way Greasemonkey does for web site specific scripts. Try it.