If you’re a web developer, then you probably have a lot of third-party tools that help you create great-looking websites in all of the different web browsers. Personally, I use Firefox on a daily basis and you can enhance Firefox with enough addons that you can do most of your testing in just one browser.
There are several very cool addons that will allow you to do everything from embeding Internet Explorer tabs inside Firefox to viewing the HTTP header information for a web page.
So here is my list of favorite Firefox addons for web developers or webmasters.
Live HTTP Headers is a very cool and simple to use addon that lets you view the HTTP headers of a web page. There are many times when you need to confirm or find out what HTTP response code is being return to the client browser.
It gives you a lot of information about each request made to the server including the response code, the server, the content-type, the keep-alive value, the expires header, the Etag, last-modified date, and lots more.
2. Firebug
Firebug is a full-featured web development package that has a whole slew of tools that you can use. It includes tabs across the tab that let you monitor, edit and debug HTML, CSS and JavaScript live on any web page.
When debugging scripts, you can actually add watch expressions and breakpoints! This is very cool considering you’re just browsing the web in a browser!
Once you have Firebug installed, you can’t stop there. You have to install PageSpeed and YSlow, two addons that integrate with Firebug and let you fully analyze all aspects of your websites performance.
YSlow is from Yahoo and is based on their principles and rules for high performance websites and PageSpeed is a tool released by Google, which does pretty much the same thing. Both are excellent and can help you significantly decrease the load time for your site.
4. IE Tab
As with all web developers, you have to view your website in multiple browsers, especially IE since that is still the most popular. Using the IE Tab addon, you can quickly see what any web page would look like in IE right inside of Firefox.
It also has some cool options so that you can set some sites that you visit to always load in IE, such as Windows Update, etc. Overall it saves you from having to have multiple browsers open at once.
Probably one of the most useful addons I have ever come across for web developers. It includes too many tools to even list them all out.
However, if you want to view detailed information about a web page right on the page itself, this addon can do that including image sizes, alt attribute values, tab index, id and class details, color information and boatloads more.
You can also use it to disable cache, Java, JavaScript, meta redirects, popup blockers and more. It has lots of tools for managing cookies, deleting cookies, clearing session cookies and more.
As an extra bonus, another great addon is User Agent Switcher, which lets your switch the user agent of the browser for testing your website.
You can also add your own user agents easily to the list if it is not included by default. So that’s it! If there is another Firefox addon that you use as a web developer, definitely add it to the comments! Enjoy!
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