Monday 3 November 2008

Top 10 Firefox Extensions

I love Firefox. Open-source, standards compliant (mostly) and with the added bonus of a huge amount of extensions. So, if you've yet to be converted, download Firefox, and then give some of these extensions a try. If you go back to "the other browser" after spending some time with Firefox, I'll eat my hat..
  1. Firebug - If you're a web designer or developer, Firebug is the definately the best reason to switch to Firefox. I'm not going to write a review, just try this top notch suite of development and client-side debugging tools for yourself. Their slogan is "Web Development Evolved". 'Nuf said.
  2. Fireshot - Ever wanted to send your client a full page screen-shot, including everything below the fold? What about being able to easy take screen grabs and annotate them. Fireshot is all you need. A really handy little add-on.
  3. Web Developer - The Web Developer extension adds various web developer tools to Firefox. It includes HTML and CSS validation tools, a ruler, enabling/disabling JavaScript and CSS and much more. A really good side-kick to Firebug.
  4. FireFtp - An FTP client, right inside Firefox, very useful, with SSL/TLS/SFTP support, automatic reconnect and resume of transfers, search and filtering and more.
  5. Palette Grabber - This is a useful one, if you like a colour-scheme you see on your web travels, you can grab the color palette for use in Flash, Photoshop, The Gimp and more. Mmmmm handy.... as Homer Simpson might say.
  6. Execute JS - An enhance JavaScript console, allowing you to quickly test arbitrary scripts, evaluate properties of an object and more. Well worth a look if you do any JavaScripting.
  7. Font Finder - This useful little add-on lets you find out the CSS properties of selected text. Simple, but very useful nevertheless.
  8. ColorZilla - Another useful tool for designers, it allows colour picking, colour palette creation, zooming, DOM based colour analysis and more
  9. YSlow - This add-on for Firefox/Firebug lets you analyse your site for performance issues and and points out problems according to Yahoo's guidelines for high-performance websites.
  10. Pencil - The Pencil add-on is a simple tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping, with built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping, Multi-page documents and more. A really useful wireframing tool, and its free.

If you are interesting in finding more Firefox extensions and add-ons, have a look at the official Firefox add-ons site. And please, DON'T revert to the dark sIdE..

1 comment:

  1. You forgot the Rainbow colour coding add-on for Firebug.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7575

    ReplyDelete