Top 10 Most useful Web Developers tools for Firefox
Firefox is always been the favorite choice for the developers for debugging and developing web applications. The extension architecture allows anyone to add powerful add-on to the browser for robust enhancement on many different development needs. I use Firefox everyday like I need to take my lunch and dinner. So here are the most useful Firefox extensions I use that I want to share with everyone. I have to admit, many of these extensions won’t come as a eye opener to developers those who are already so deep with Firefox extensions, but hopefully there will be some you’ve yet to know about.
Table of Contents
#1 Web Developer Tools for Firefox
Web Developer should be your first of many extensions, largely because it is many extensions in one, it has terrific tools like image and form debugging, HTML and CSS validation, windows resizing, and many more. If your Web site has a mixed types of source code, this extension easily locates CSS, Javascript, and so on. Once you’ve finished playing with the code into your editor, you can validate the code directly via W3C to ensure that the code is clean and under W3C compliance.
#2 Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This is one Swiss army knife that no web developer should live without. It lets you debug your pages, css, scripts on the fly without making any modification to the original codes. It’s a dream tool for the CSS designers too. It’s meant and made for advanced developers needs in mind.
#3 ColorZilla
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. And more…
#4 Tamper Data
Use tamperdata to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters. It can Trace and time http response/requests. Very useful for Security test web applications by modifying POST parameters.
Note: Current version of Google Web Accelerator is incompatible with the tampering function of TamperData. Your browser might crash.
#5 YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. You need to have Firebug Installed before you install YSlow. YSlow gives you Performance report card, HTTP/HTML summary, List of components in the page and Tools including JSLint. YSlow is developed by Yahoo. This tool is very important to analyze your website performance and lags.
#6 IE Tab
IE Tab is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in Micrsoft Internet Explorer with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. It embed the IE right inside a Firefox Tab so that you can review your website how it looks in IE.
#7 FireFTP
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. FireFTP is fast, secure and handy. It works right inside Firefox in a separate tab. Once you start using it, it’s hard to let it go.
#8 FirePHP
FirePHP is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON or XML responses are required. All data is sent via a set of X-FirePHP-Data response headers. This means that the debugging data will not interfere with the content on your page.
You must have Firebug installed and the “Net” panel enabled to use this extension.
You must also download a PHP library from http://www.firephp.org/HQ/
#9 SeoQuake
A must have tool for the SEO beginners and experts alike. Beginner web masters and seos will find SeoQuake useful for estimating effectiveness and competitive ability of their SEO efforts. In the hands of professional SeoQuake will become a powerful and indispensable tool for analyzing optimization and promotion level of internet web-projects. SeoQuake can be distinguished from similar projects by a wide range of parameters available for analysis, simplicity of use and also a tool for creation of custom parameters.
SeoBar
SeoBar can be described as an additional toolbar, which shows the values of selected parameters for the page currently opened in the browser window. Set of parameters shown by SeoBar is fully customizable by user.
Inclusion of parameters in SERPs
After submission of the query into the search engine user is presented with SERP with search results. SeoQuake shows values of the parameters for search results under each search result shown on SERP. Set of parameters shown is fully customizable by user. Loading of parameters can be handled in two different ways – simultaneously with the loading of the SERP or after SERP loading, by user demand. Ranking of the results by selected parameter in ascending/descending order and storing results in file are available features.
Know more about this tool.
#10 LinkChecker
LinkChecker is a real handy extension to check all the links in a web page automatically and mark them out. Pretty simple but handy and it helps the developers find dead links easily, even from from search engine results.
There are many other tools available for Firefox but these are the most useful and essential tools for everyday web development works.
Do you have a suggestion to add to this list? Feel free to comment.
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