Ever since I began to use Firefox years ago; no other web browser have attracted me. Only recently, Google Chrome became good enough to assist in web development work. Nowadays, browsers are also equally important tools for web design and development as the likes of Dreamweaver.
Depending upon my experience with lots of Firefox extensions, I have selected the following 12 add-ons the best and must-have for web developers. Let’s take a look.
In my view, and millions would agree with me, this is the best and must have Firefox extension for web developers. Firebug has influenced web development in a big way. When I sit down to decide about the best add-ons for web developers –I found that Firebug provides several such features in one package which otherwise are available as standalone add-ons as well. So, obviously, it’s better to install Firebug and get all the functionality instead of installing several different add-ons.
With Firebug, you can edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript on-the-fly and see the results in real-time. Load a web page in Firefox, open Firebug to see the source code of the page and edit it the way you like. The effect of changes shall be visible instantly.
This extension provides extensive color information related with any web page. Most commonly it is used to pick the hex color code from a particular portion of the web page. But it is also loaded with other features like palette browser and CSS gradient generator.
This tool is great for displaying information hidden in the code. For example, on one click it can display the “alt” attributes of all the images present on a web page! It can outline a particular type of elements present on the page. This extension has a number of very useful features which can make life of a web developer much easier.
Nowadays, websites needs to be fast. This Firefox add-on is based on the rules of high performance as defined by Yahoo! The add-on itself is also developed by Yahoo! Inc. YSlow analyzes the performance of the web page and tells you the reason why it is performing slow. Installation of Firebug is a prerequisite for YSlow to function. Once both of these extensions are installed –YSlow appears as a tab in Firebug window.
Greasemonkey extension acts like a platform on which you can run other scripts. These scripts can alter the display of a web page and add more functionality to it to make your surfing easier. These scripts can add functionality to a web page that is not provided by the website owner. Hundreds of such ready-made scripts are available for use from http://userscripts-mirror.org/ and you can write your own scripts to be run on Greasemonkey.
A very useful add-on for those who mind SEO aspect of web development. SeoQuake displays a toolbar which gives you valuable SEO information about the current web page being viewed by you. It shows PageRank, Alexa Rank, Age Rank, Links in Google Index, Yahoo’s Linkdomain result, external links, internal links and keyword density in addition to other information.
It’s a simple tool to take screen shots. Very useful for those web developers who prepare tutorials and courseware related web pages. You can capture the entire screen, entire web pages or a selected area on screen. FireShot comes with an image editor that can be used to manipulate the screen shots.
It is an FTP client that runs right into your browser. Although not as powerful as FTP clients like FileZilla and CuteFTP –this little add-on might prove convenient to many web developers –especially if you are working on small websites.
Making web page code compatible among many browsers is one of the biggest headache for web developers. Internet Explorer is the leading trouble maker because it is not based on standards. This Firefox add-on will help you to see how your web page will appear in IE. This is pretty handy as you don’t need to open the slow and irritating browser from Microsoft.
You can block JavaScript, Java and other executable scripts on any web page you wish. This is not only useful from security viewpoint –but also this add-on gives you an idea as to how your web page will look if JavaScript is not enabled on target browser.
Just as the name suggests –this add-on provides a JavaScript debugging environment. Especially useful for people who work a lot with JavaScript.
It is a brilliant validation tool as it uses official DTDs for HTML validation. Moreover it can do accessibility validation as well.
Alright friends, so this was the list of best Firefox extensions to assist in web development work. How many of these do you use? Which ones do you like? Please share with me your experience and suggest if you would have added another add-on into this list.
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