Ian’s Online Technical Notebook

I have used Mozilla Firefox for many years now when I have been developing websites and also for personal use too. It may not be the fastest browser around but I am willing to sacrifice speed for usability in this case as the add-ons available for Firefox are some of the best around. I am going to go through some of them and why I use them and hopefully help someone else to discover a useful add-on they might not have heard of before.

Firebug

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

Firebug is a fantastic tool for web development because it allows you to dive into the code behind a webpage and allows you to very quickly inspect and even edit the code. You can make changes to the CSS on a webpage and see the change happening in real time. This allows you to try out changes before you commit them to a style sheet. If you are struggling with the CSS box model implementation then you can see visually how your margin and padding are represented on the page so you can make changes if required. There are many, many more things Firebug can do so if you are interested then check out the website. If you only ever install one add-on make sure it is this one if you are a webpage developer.

FireShot

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648

FireShot allows you to take a picture of the current webpage and process it in a number of different ways including uploading to a another website, saved as it is or sent to an image processing program for further tweaks. This is very useful to produce screenshots of whole web pages for clients to view work in progress. Another add-on that comes highly recommended.

Web Developer toolbar

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

The Web Developer toolbar has been around ever since I’ve been using Firefox, and while its usefulness has been overshadowed by Firebug in my opinion, it still packs a lot of really useful features to help you with web development. This comes highly recommended too.

Colorzilla

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271

Sometimes when you are browsing for inspiration you come across a colour that you would like to use. This add-on allows you to simply pick the colour as you would in a paint program and then utilise it in your own creations.

Delicious Bookmarks

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

If you have an account set up with Delicious like I have then you will agree with me when I say it is a very useful website for saving web pages to come back to later. You can tag pages and then sort by a specific tag which is extremely useful. This add-on makes it even easier to tag web pages and retrieve your bookmarks. There is also a toolbar added to Firefox with the option of seeing your bookmarks in a variety of different ways. Fantastic!

DownThemAll

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201

DownThemAll turns the already good download capabilities of Firefox into something even better. You can download single links to a designated folder with just one right-click, download multiple links/files off one page with the ability to filter out by customisable criteria and once the files are in the download manager you are able to specify when you want to download them and when you do download them it opens multiple connections so the only limit is your download speed not the speed of the network or web server which is worth the install alone. Comes highly recommended!

I hope those add-ons have wet your appetite for ways to make your life easier in Firefox. I have not touched the surface of what is available out there. What have you got in your arsenal that you can not live without? Please post your top tips in the comments.