Mozilla released Firefox 4.0 on Tuesday—it has already been downloaded 16,041,437 times; that’s about 92 downloads a second!— and there is a lot to commend it for: a clean look, that’s not too far away from both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 and it’s much faster too.
While I use Google Chrome for most of my day-to-day browsing I still use Firefox for Web development, largely thanks to the number of mature add-ons available for it. These are my favourites:
1. Firebug
Firebug is the number one reason that I use Firefox. Sure, Chrome and Internet Explorer have their own Web developer tools but none of them come close to Firebug for its awesomeness.
That said, I recently tried out Opera Dragonfly and I was really impressed.
2. Web Developer
A close second is Chris Penderick’s Web Developer toolbar that adds all sorts of useful tools to Firefox: disable CSS, outline headings and tables on the page, show HTML classes and IDs, show image sizes as overlays on the images. Brilliant!
3. ColorZilla
The most useful feature of ColorZilla for me is the eyedropper tool that allows me to sample a colour on a Web page and find out the RGB or HEX value for it.
4. HTML Validator
HTML Validator does exactly what it suggests that it does: it shows HTML validation information in the Firefox add-on bar (what used to be the status bar) at the foot of the browser viewport.
It’s very useful for at-a-glance error checking; obviously, recognising that HTML validation is an ideal and a guide rather than a hard-and-fast rule.
5. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer is a new add-on for me that adds to Firefox the functionality that I’ve been enjoying with the Chrome Sniffer extension in Google Chrome.
It shows you in the AwesomeBar what technologies are being used, e.g. JavaScript framework, server type, content management system, web statistics, etc.
6. RSS Icon in Awesombar
For some unfathomable reason Mozilla has removed the RSS icon that appears in the AwesomeBar when you visit a page that has an RSS autodiscovery tag, such as the University homepage.
That’s where RSS Icon in Awesombar (sic) comes in. It… well, puts an RSS icon in the AwesomeBar.
7. Tab Mix Plus
There are some options within Firefox that I still cannot believe are missing. There is still no way to, by default, open your homepage when you open a new tab.
Tab Mix Plus allows you to set this option—and a whole lot more, like being able to duplicate existing tabs, or protect or lock tabs so that you don’t accidentally close them.
Over to you…
What are your favourite Firefox add-ons, for Web development or otherwise?
The post My favourite Web developer add-ons for Firefox first appeared on Digital Communications team blog.