Besides the obvious benefits like better security, using Firefox as your browser of choice also gives you some distinct benefits in other areas as well. From additional protection like no script to doing search engine optimization research at a glance with SEO Quake, there’s a lot of options available to you. If you’re an avid video watcher, of course, it’s likely that you want a plugin that will handle, download, and organize these files for you, and Firefox plugins do not disappoint here either.

One of my favorite video plugins is Fast Video Download, which allows you to pull down video files from embedded video media sites like Youtube, Break.com, Dailymotion, and a slew of others. The plugin boasts hundreds of thousands of downloads a week and is constantly updated. Fast Video Download will allow you to save a video to your hard drive with the click of a button, which opens a “save as” dialog with the video title and extension already in place. Definitely handy.

In that vein another similar plugin that has the same functionality but with increased capacity is Video Downloader. This addon will allow you to pull down embedded content from a web page with the click of a button. We’re not just talking videos, either. It can allow you to save movies, mp3 files, flash animations, quicktime. etc. In all, it’s compatible with over 60 video sites out there and a wide variety of video formats. Video downloader is also fairly popular, bringing in about 11,000 new downloads per week.

If you come across a site that’s streaming video but you’re not sure where the source is from, you can use the popular Unplug plugin. This plugin will scan any site you come across for media files and report back to you with the source. In addition, in most cases, it’ll then open up a download link and let you pull down the video file as well.Unplug boasts about 7,000 downloads a week. if for some reason Unplug can’t find the exact source of your video file, it will make it’s best educated guess. According to user feedback the software is actually quite good at guessing, and will make the correct assessment “most of the time.” Your mileage may vary!

Being able to download videos for later use or to keep important information archived is a great tool to have, and these plugins will allow you to easily pull down the information you need. As they’re fairly popular plugins, you can also talk to fellow users if you run into any problems, technical or otherwise.