How times have changed; with Firefox addons you can get some amazing features.
Here are my favourite five:
1) Web Developer
This has to be number one for so many reasons.
The main thing, for me, is the CSS viewer; it graphically highlights your various CSS bits and bobs. It shows you all the information you need to work out why that damn div is floating wrong, or what style is causing a particular effect. It's got me out of all sorts of confusing situations in the past.
As well as this, it lets you do loads of other stuff, including:
- Enable/Disable cookies
- Enable/Disable CSS
- View Form and Image information
- A ruler (to measure things on screen)
- Outlining of frames, tables, etc.
- Various code validators
2) the Delicious toolbar
Simple, efficient, useful. That's got to be three of the best adjectives to hear somebody use to describe your software. In this case they're all true.
If you're not familiar with Delicious, it is a service that lets you store your bookmarks online. Sounds kind of pointless but trust me, you'll use it more than you might think. As well as being able to have a network of friends on there, and view all their saved links (if they want you to) it de-centralises your bookmarks, meaning you get to your favourites from any browser, and on any computer.
I find myself clicking the "tag" button whenever I come across something interesting that I think someone in my network might be interested in, as well as adding long documents or webpages that I want to save for later.
3) YSlow
Very handy little tool that shows you how long each element in a page takes to load. It needs the firebug extension, but that's no biggy.
The most useful application of it for me, is to find out what bits of a page are slowing it down, basically eliminating trial and error when you're optimising a page. It'll even draw you a pretty chart to show which types of object are taking longest.
4) ColorZilla
Not one that gets used every day, but extremely handy when it does get used.
Adds a colour picker to FF similar to the one that you get in Photoshop, letting you get the numerical value for any colour you mouse over. Very useful if you are developing a page and want to know what colour is being rendered, without having to screengrab and paste into a graphics program.
5) SQL Inject Me
This one highlights any vunerabilities you might have in your website that could be exploited using SQL injections. Whilst you should always know about and prevent this sort of attack from the get go, it's nice to have an application that will hunt down any gaping holes in your site.
After all, you really really don't want people being able to break your site or delete your customers from a form on your site, so it's always worth double and triple checking before your site goes live.
Images (click for full-size)
Viewing style information with web developer add-on
Seeing why a page loads slowly with YSlow
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