Essential Firefox Extensions for Webmasters
Firefox is as very popular web browser and is being used by more people everyday. It is particularly popular among web developers, not least due to the add-ons available for the browser.
There are quite a few excellent add-ons for Firefox that make our lives as web developers much easier. We will look at the best ones in this article.
Web Developer Toolbar
This is ultimate add-on for web developers. It has been downloaded over 8.5 million times and is essential for any web development tasks.
It allows you to modify pages and environmental variables to help you identify problems on your pages. You can modify and remove cookies, disable images, modify stylesheets, find broken images, outline divs, tables, classes, ids and headers. You can also test the HTML and CSS validity and check links and accessibility status. It cannot be recommended highly enough as an excellent tool for web developers.
Download the Web Developer Toolbar
IE Tab
This add-on allows you to view how a page is rendered in Internet Explorer, right from within Firefox itself.
Cross-browser testing is essential and this add-on allows you to test your page is another browser without having to fire up Internet Explorer.
Live HTTP Headers
Live HTTP Headers allows you to view the meta-information that is sent with every HTTP request. It is useful for checking header status returned and for checking Etags, expiry information and server information. You can also get a list of all the HTTP requests used to generate a page.
It is also helpful to check the HTTP error code returned for a page, which is helpful for keeping th search engines happy.
Firebug
Firebug is a tool that helps you debug your HTML, CSS and javascript. You can edit your CSS live in the page to see the results instantly. You can also debug javascript errors.
YSlow
This is a tool by Yahoo that profiles web pages and helps you to optimise loading times by applying Yahoo’s high performance rules. It requires Firebug to be installed first.
YSlow grades each component of your page from A to F and then gives you an overall rating. It then tells you what to do to improve the performance of your webpages.
Screengrab
One thing you might find yourself doing quite often as a web developer is taking screenshots of webpages. It is surprisingly tricky to take a screenshot of an entire page without having to download external software. Screengrab is an excellent tool that gives you the option of capturing a whole page, just the visible part or a selection. It will either save the file or copy it to the clipboard, it’s up to you.
Summary
There are, of course, many hundreds of addons for Firefox and lots of them are useful for web developers. These ones here are my favourites that I use everyday. Feel free to post your favourites in the comments below.
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