Extending Firefox: 10 Top Extensions for Web Builders

Firefox has rapidly become the browser of choice for the tech-savvy, and especially among web builders that like its standards-compliance, tabbed-browsing, size and advanced features.

One of Firefox's most powerful features is its extensibility. Firefox extensions are easy to install, and provide a wide variety of new features. Many of these extensions add capabilities that are valuable for Web developers.

Here are ten of the best Firefox extensions for Web developers:

NoScript

This extension gives users control over the sites for which Firefox will execute JavaScript and Java. It's handy for developers, because you can quickly enable and disable code execution to understand how your site will degrade with JavaScript or Java disabled.

AdSense Notifier

AdSense users can be obsessive about checking their stats and earnings, because AdSense provides an easy way for site owners to make some money with contextual advertising.

Adsense Notifier displays your AdSense stats in the Firefox status bar, so you can check them at a glance. The stats are automatically updated at user-specified intervals.

Blogging Extensions

This is a bit of a catch-all, because there are extensions for a variety of blogging applications and services. JustBlogIt, LiveJournal Hook and BloggerBar are a few of the blogging extensions. JustBlogIt, for example, lets you create posts to Blogger, Drupal, Movable Type, WordPress and other blogging and content management systems.

LinkChecker

This extension adds an option to the right-click menu to Check Page Links.

The extension highlights each link it finds, showing red for broken links, yellow for forwarded or forbidden links, green for good links and gray for skipped links. The extension makes short work of checking the validity of a page's links.

MeasureIt

This handy extension lets you measure the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage. It adds an icon in the lower left corner of the Firefox status bar. Click on the MeasureIt icon, and the Web page is "grayed out", and the cursor turns into a cross-hair that lets you draw a box over the web page. The tool interactively displays the height and width of the box, making it easy to check spacing, sizing of images, etc.

Checky

Checky eliminates excuses for not validating web pages. The extension provides an easy-to-use interface to a variety of online validation and page analysis services. Right-click a web page, select Checky, and then validate and analyze HTML, XHTML, CSS, RDF, RSS, XML, WAI, Section 508, P3P, Hyperlinks, metadata and more.

ColorZilla

This extension adds several features that are useful for developing graphics for web pages, including an advanced eyedropper, colorpicker and page zoomer.

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