If you haven’t unleashed the full potential of your Firefox Browser yet, now is the time to do so. Firefox’s extendability is perhaps the most powerful aspect of that browser. And especially for web developers like myself and many others, Firefox add-ons offer so many amazing functionalities that make your life so much easier. If you still don’t use Firefox yet, you can get it here.

1. Web Developer Tool

This tool allows you to view information of each individual items, turn images on and off, turn CSS on and off, view CSS information by element, display hidden form values, display DIV layer information, table informaion… I can’t go on. It can do so many things. And it was also a crucial part of my hack as described in my previous post here! This tool is so perfect for troubleshooting of javascript, configuring your HTML and CSS for proper display, and much more! I could write an entire blog about this extension alone (I might do that one day!).

I put 2 screenshots of the developer tool in action, but keep in mind there’s much more to it!!!

2. Firebug

Along with the Web Developer Tool as described above, this provides an excellent platform for troubleshooting your code, primarily Javascript. But it also gives you an excellent collapsable display of the raw output HTML tags so that you can troubleshoot any HTML problems. Also it gives you an advanced platform for handling XML queries, which proves to be so powerful for troubleshooting AJAX!

The image you see to the right is a screenshot of the XML module. The GET command shows what file was hit by my AJAX call, and the response shows EXACTLY what it returned in raw code! Isn’t this amazing for AJAX development and troubleshooting??? It also has header informations so you can figure out any troubles with the server communication itself.

Also added in the new version of it is displaying margins, sizes, and paddings of layers by ID in all the pages, which makes page layouts so much easier, ESPECIALLY if you use the new DIV/CSS method of layouts!

3. IE Tab

One of the greatest challenges for web developers is to ensure that our webpages work fine on both IE and FF. Traditionally we would have both browsers open, and we’d switch back and forth between the two. Now, there is an easy IE/FF switch tab extension available. It simply offers a button at the bottom-right that you can click which triggers your browser window to run off different engines!

4. Search Status

This add-on displays your Google pagerank as well as your Alexa pagerank on the corner of your browser. Very recently it somehow jumped from my bottom right corner to my top left corner somehow and I haven’t figured out how to move it. It doesn’t matter though. It simply gives you a quick overview of the search rankings, and gives you a tool for SEO.

It also offers quick links to valuable Google analytics pages by right-clicking on it.

5. PDF Download

The PDF download extension gives you more options when you click on a link to a PDF file. Sometimes you want to open it within your browser, and sometimes you simply want to save it, or view it on your own Adobe Acrobat on your computer rathern than within your browser. Instead of having to do these steps manually, this extension gives you the options to do so right away upon clicking the link.

6. Facebook Toolbar

The Facebook Toolbar is an extension that the development team of Facebook created themselves. If you’re not entirely sure what facebook is, you can read my post about it here. This toolbar gives you instant notifications of friends’ activities, pokes, and everything else! So you can turn your email notifications off, and simply use this tool instead. I know this is a bit off from the whole topic of web-development, but I find this to be a good example of great marketing by the Facebook team. And I know a lot of you use facebook, and this will help save some time!

So there it is, a list of perhaps the most critical and useful Firefox Add-ons I have installed on my machine! If you have any more suggestions, please leave comments, as I will add them to this post or another post later! Cheers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Marketing and Media, Software, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.