While surfing with Firefox's status bar hidden gives you a little more viewing area, it can cause you grief sometimes. For example, when you think you're about to download a file directly and instead have three pop-up windows shoved in your face.

I was glad to find Linkalert, a handy little Firefox extension that gives you visual feedback about links you hover over. While it's not going to blow you away with advanced functionality the way some addons do, it's a decent way to keep yourself informed about the links you might click.

Park your pointer on a link, and Linkalert will display an icon indicating what the destination contains. It supports office files, email links, rss, zip, pdf, Javascript, new windows, and more. The new window and Javascript alerts alone can keep you out of a lot of trouble.

It'll also present you with a lock when linking to a secure site, and will open the lock icon when you're about to click out of it. Useful!