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I’ve recently been playing around with Firefox’s Add-on Collector, and I have to say it could be really useful but currently it fails to deliver on its potential.

Here’s how Mozilla describes the Add-on Collector:

Discover more of the best add-ons and organize your favorites in easy-to-manage collections. Subscribe to see how the collections you admire grow, and fans follow when you manage and update your own collections.

At first, I assumed this meant I could subscribe to lists (aka collections) of Firefox add-ons and have changes to those collections pushed to me. The truth is that it only half works like that.

Yes you can subscribe to collections of add-ons. And yes you will be notified when those collections change. So far so good. But the Add-On Collector provides no way for you to easily install all the add-ons from a collection. You still have to install each add-on one by one, manually. It even asks you to restart after each one (hint: you can wait until you’ve installed all of them before restarting).

I assume Mozilla didn’t think installing add-ons automatically was a good idea for security reasons. Imagine if the publisher of a popular collection quietly added a “Steal all your info” add-on to the list and then cackled as all his subscribers’ browsers auto-installed it. So it makes sense that the Add-On Collector doesn’t auto-install add-ons. But there’s not even a button to “Install All” when you subscribe to a collection (or “Remove All” when unsubscribing). Subscribing to a collection just shows you the list of add-ons and it’s up to you to go install them or not.

In addition, you have to register for a Mozilla account in order to add or manage subscriptions. Your subscriptions are stored on Mozilla’s servers. There’s no option to keep everything local on your machine. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s kind of a pain. Ideally after installing the Add-On Collector I could just start using it immediately without jumping through more hoops.

Overall, I’m a little disappointed in the Add-On Collector but it’s still better than nothing. It’s not an end-to-end solution for add-on installation and management. But once you have a Mozilla account (and remember to log in), it’s great for add-on discovery and for organizing your favorite add-ons.

You can install the Add-on Collector (which is itself a Firefox Add-on) from this page.

Once it’s installed, check out my “Can’t Browse Without” collection of add-ons. Or browse other popular collections.

In case you didn’t know, you’re entitled to a free credit report from each credit reporting bureau each year. And since there are three different reporting bureaus, that means you can alternate amongst them and check your credit report every 4 months. Why is it important to get regular, timely credit reports? Because it’s really the only way to know if you’re the victim of identity theft before significant damage is done.

The latest 2009 identity theft study from the Javelin Strategy and Research group shows that:

• Identity theft is on the rise, affecting almost 10 million victims in 2008 (a 22% increase from 2007)
• 71% of fraud happens within a week of stealing a victim’s personal data.
• Low-tech methods for stealing personal information are still the most popular for identity thieves. Stolen wallets and physical documents accounted for 43% of all identity theft, while online methods accounted for only 11%.

But the good news is that it’s easy and free to keep tabs on your financial identity. Just log onto AnnualCreditReport.com and request your report. You can then see all the open accounts in your name. Make sure that you were the one who opened every account. Set a reminder for yourself to do this every 4 months with a different credit bureau.

Make sure you only go to AnnualCreditReport.com. There are other sites that claim to offer free credit reports but often they will trick you into signing up for expensive and useless credit monitoring programs. The Federal Trace Commission website says that AnnualCreditReport is the only authorized source to get your free annual credit report under federal law.

Watch this video to learn more about protecting your identity.