An update on my previous list, surprisingly not too much has changed so credit is definitely due to the hard working developers of these add-ons for keeping them going over the last few years. Firebug has definitely shot straight to the top my list as the most useful browser addon ever, I wish every browser had it (especially IE, oh I can dream). I am actually personally starting to sway more towards Chrome these days, though I always seem to come back to Firefox when making CSS tweaks. Anyways, here’s my list of the top 7 developer add-ons for firefox.
- Firebug
Integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
- Web Developer Toolbar
Adds a menu and a toolbar with various developer tools.
- Html Validator
Adds HTML validation to the View Page Source of the browser. The validation is done by Tidy or a SGML Parser from W3c. The only problem is it’s HTML5 support isn’t the greatest, hopefully an update will come along soon, though as an alternative there is also Total Validator.
- ColorZilla
Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.
- YSlow
An extension of Firebug, YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites. YSlow gives you a performance report card, HTTP/HTML summary, list of components in the page and tools including JSLint.
- LiveReload
Refreshes a web page when files change. Makes updating HTML and CSS so much easier, this is especially useful in conjunction with Sublime Text.
- FireFTP
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP/SFTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP/SFTP servers.
- Screenshot
This add-on allows you to take screenshots of the webpage you are viewing. This currently seems to not be working, will keep my eye on it and remove if it’s not supported anymore.
So those are my personal favourites, if you can recommend any others then let me know below, would love to hear from you and hopefully add some more to the list.
