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The Best Firefox Developer Extensions Around

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox offers a lot of advantages over other browsers, namely Internet Explorer. One of the greatest advantages it offers, is the ability to install add-ons. There are plenty of great plugins available for developers to use to help them make better websites and make them easier to navigate. There are extensions that cover SQL, regular expressions, debugging, security issues, FTP, and more. Here is a list of 20 great Firefox extensions for developers.

  • Firebug – This extension provides debugging capabilities while viewing a web page. There is live debugging on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It is recommended to turn off this extension while not debugging, due to a speed lag in browsing.
  • FireFTP – This extension is a full featured FTP client that integrates into Firefox. It is free and includes features like drag & drop, encryption, search, directory comparisons, and directory syncing, just to name a few.
  • FireShot – This extension takes screenshots of web pages. It allows you to save the image, copy it to the clipboard, and edit the screenshot. You can also choose to capture only the visible area or the whole page. This is a very useful extension for bloggers who often review web pages.
  • Screengrab – This extension is another extension that allows you to take screenshots of web pages. The features include saving the image or copying to the clipboard. It also supports capturing the visible area, the entire page, a selection, or a frame.
  • Greasemonkey – This is one of the coolest extensions available. It allows you to customize how web pages behave using JavaScript. There arehundreds, if not thousands, of scripts available to download, and you can create your own. This is an easy way to improve on web pages that you didn’t create, as well as the ones that you did.
  • Web Developer – This extension adds a toolbar that has a large selection of webmaster tools and resources. It includes the ability to view the source and the CSS easily by loading them into a new tab within the current window. It allows for one-click validation of HTML, CSS, Feeds, and more. Other features include information and manipulation of images, forms, and cookies.
  • YSlow – YSlow is an extension developed by Yahoo! to help understand why a web page is slow. There are report cards generated that detail why the web page is performing poorly based on Yahoo’s rules for a high performing website.
  • HTML Validator – This extension integrates HTML validation directly into Firefox. The validation is based on Tidy and gives detailed output of the errors that are found. Icons are visible in the status bar that give general counts for errors and warnings.
  • JavaScript Debugger – This extension provides feedback for JavaScript errors. This is very useful when needing to determine what has gone wrong. It provides a lot of detailed information to help you troubleshoot and fix the problem.
  • Dummy Lipsum – This extension provides on-the-fly creation of Lorem Ipsum dummy text to use as a placeholder. Lorem Ipsum text has become the universal default text used as a placeholder in web pages, and this extension provides a fast and easy solution. You need a minimum of 5 words, but you can create many paragraphs worth of text if needed. This is a very useful time saver.
  • SQL Inject Me – This extension is a security tool for checking the vulnerability of your forms. It submits your forms with typical SQL injection values and the shows the database errors that occur.
  • XSS Me – This extension is very similar to the SQL Inject Me extension. It is a security tool that tests the vulnerability or your site to XSS, or cross-site scripting, attacks.
  • ColorZilla – This extension provides an eyedropper and color picker for web pages. You can easily determine what color is being displayed on the page and then create custom color palettes from it.
  • Regular Expressions Tester – This extension provides testing capabilities to your regular expressions. You can plug the expressions in here and determine if they are correct and will do what you wanted them to do. It includes a save feature that allows you to keep previously tested regular expressions readily available.
  • XML Developer Toolbar – This extension is very similar to the Web Developer extension. It tracks a large range of items pertaining to XML. It allows for validation, generation, and manipulation of XML schemas, DTD’s, and XSL’s.
  • Load Time Analyzer – This extension was developed by Google and is used to track and report on how long it takes a web page to load. The output is very easy to read in graph form. You can customize what events you would like to measure.
  • Server Switcher – This extension is very handy for switching between your development server and your live hosting server. It allows you to switch between each in one click, or keyboard shortcut, and is completely customizable to your servers.
  • Window Resizer – This extension allows you to switch between different resolutions and screen sizes for testing your layout. This is great for designing themes, because of the obvious need to accommodate as many resolutions as possible.
  • SQLite Manager – This extension is used to manage SQLite databases on your computer. You can browse, search, edit, add, and delete using this tool. You can also run SQL queries against the database. This is a very nice tool if you use SQLite.
  • MeasureIt – This is a very simple, yet very useful extension. It is basically a ruler that allows you to find out how much space something is taking up on the page. This is good for developing themes and working on the layout of your web page. It can save you a lot of time, since you won’t need to guess and try different pixel dimensions.

What other extensions do you use to help you when developing websites? Let us know in the comments.



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