Firefox add-ons, also known as extensions, and sometimes confused with pluggins, have completely cemented our loyalty to Firefox as a development tool. Why? Because these little tools are so powerful, and Firefox has provided significantly more options than Internet Explorer or Safari. Not sure what add-ons are? They are small pieces of software that add new features or tiny tweaks to your browser. Many are useless, but some are absolutely spectacular.
So which pluggins do we love?
Firebug
Webdeveloper Toolbar
ColorZilla
Flash Switcher (win only)
MeasureIt
Load Time Analyzer
PDF Download
foXpose
FontFinder
IETab (win only)
Firebug & Webdeveloper Toolbar
This is like the debugger you’d find in traditional development environmentsbut designed for the Web (which means it has to be on the browser). Firebug lets you view and edit HTML and CSS realtime on any page (the page changes instantly). It clearly displays which CSS rules affect the element you select in the style inspector. Moreover, it breaks down the rules that affect the element directly as well as rules it inherits properties from. Then there are the JavaScript debugger and the validity inspectors. Together, these form a very powerful package when trying to track down those mysterious bugs that often appear in complex sites.
For every time you begrudged having to do a screen shot and paste it into photoshop to figure out the exact color of something, your woes are over. Now you can have your very own eyedropper and zoom tool directly within your browser.
Work in Flash? This nifty tool will let you determine exactly which version of the flash pluggin you are currently using to render a swf file. This way you can test for both flash 8 & flash 9.
Draws out a ruler to measure the exact pixel dimensions of anything on your screen.
Measure and graph how long web pages take to load. Load Time Analyzer produces graphs that show the occurrence of events such as requests for the page, images, stylesheets, and scripts, along with events like the execution of an onload script. Pretty nifty if you are trying to figure out what has slowed your page to a crawl.
Fixes the fact that mozilla and adobe can’t play in the same sandbox without fighting. You’d think they could figure it out without a pluggin. Allows you to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or as HTML), if you want to view it outside Firefox with your default or custom PDF reader, or if you want to download it! No more waiting for 2 minutes while everything freezes.
Like to work with a large number of tabs open? Allows you to see more than one tab at once and quickly view thumbs of all your tabs to find things quickly.
Simply highlight a single element (e.g. a paragraph or a strong tag ), right-click and select `Font Finder`, then marvel as the full CSS text styling of the selected element appears. oohhh… ahhhh.
Save yourself the hassle of having multiple browsers open. You can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. Wish they had one for safari as well.
So which pluggins do you use?