Introduction
If you’re a web developer then I’ve got Ten Firefox plugins for you! I couldn’t imagine my work without them and neither should you! So without further adieu. . . .
FireBug
There is a reason this is at the top of my list. It’s by far, the most useful plugin for any web developer. Especially for those who are doing javascript and AJAX.
It has a world class javascript error console, much better than the annoying popup one that comes standard with FF (no offense guys).
On top of the superb console it also has an HTML, CSS, DOM and Script inspector so that you can get down to the nitty gritty at run time.
YSlow
Ok, I’m kind of cheating, this isn’t exactly a plugin but rather it’s an extension for FireBug. The only complaint I had about Firebug was that it didn’t have a very good performance monitor and it wasn’t very good at helping you optimize your scripts. Well here comes YSlow to the rescue. It installs right into Firebug and is a welcome addition to all the other great features.
Web Developer
This is really handy tool as it provides links to very useful resources for validation, optimization reports, document information and much more. It’s conveniently available from the toolbar and the Tools Menu.
Screengrab!
Another great Firefox Plugin! For those of you on a PC this is a dream come true. Most of you probably know how much of a hassle it is to take a screen shot. Well not any more! Screengrab saves you a lot of time and energy, it gives you the option of saving a part of the screen, the whole screen or even a whole web document! You can even save it to the clipboard or directly to your hard drive.
ColorZilla
Here’s another gem. How many times have you wanted to sample a color from a website and you had to go through that whole Photoshp routine? This takes out that step makes it a snap to grab colors. It installs into the bottom left corner of your screen is always conveniently available when you need to sample a color. It returns the RGB values as well as the hexidecimal values.
My only complaint about this plugin is that it doesn’t save the hex value into the clipboard, but other than that it’s a must have for any web developer or designer.
PicLens
Ah one of my favorite plugins! This is very elegant has very high production values. It’s not just for web developers either, it’s for anyone who searches for images on the internet. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent looking for royalty free, high quality images on Google. As soon as I got this I was able to browse through hundreds of images in seconds and find the perfect image in minutes.
You’re going to have to try this plugin to really appreciate what it can do.
Stumbleupon Toolbar
If you aren’t signed up for stumbleupon yet then you simply have to sign up now! For those unfamiliar, stumbleupon is a community based plugin that lets you view and rate websites. The more people rate it the more times it shows up when you click the “Stumble Button”.
The stumble button basically grabs a random website from a category of your choosing. When you set that category to Web Development you will get a ton of interesting and valuable information about that topic.
MeasureIt
This plugin lets you do measurements of the browser. It’s located conveniently at the bottom left hand corner of the browser. All you have to do is click and drag and it will display the width and height of your selection in pixels.
IE View
This plugin adds an option to the right click menu to view the website in Internet Explorer. It also adds an option to the tools menu to ALWAYS view the web page from internet explorer. I’m not so sure I would ever want that but hey, it’s still useful.
Dummy Lipsum
Ah the good ol’ Lorem Ipsum. For those unfamiliar, its dummy text that you can use until that client finally decides to send you content for that website that’s been sitting around for 6 months.
I used to go to www.lipsum.com for all my Lorem Ipsum needs but now it’s right at my browser at all times! It lets me generate text by paragraph, words, bytes or lists.
Conclusion
I hope this article was useful, if you have any more recommendations why not post them in the comments below?
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Comments
Post by Sarah (novanda.com) on July 4, 2008
I would probably recommend IE Tab rather than IE View, but I haven't used the latter and it may work better for you. Anyway, THANK YOU for pointing to the screen ruler! I'll definitely be downloading it, and several others on this list as well.
Post by Michalis89 on October 19, 2009
I like the pdfconverter I think is called save as pdf... very useful 'cause sometimes you want to keep sites but it bothers me to carry those pages with all the folders.. many times it's important but you know pdf are so portable.