Extending Firefox: 10 Top Extensions for Web Builders

September 27, 2005 —

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.

Colorzilla lets you zoom in on any web page, measure colors with an eyedropper tool, and immediately see the RGB and hex color values. You can also create and save custom color palette while you browse.

Screen grab

Screengrab is a tool that lets you save Web pages as images. Right-click on any web page, and you can save the entire page as an image, the visible portion of the page, or the browser window.

View Rendered Source Chart

This extension isn't especially sexy, but it makes reading the source code for a web page easier. The extension displays HTML with color-coding, formatting and style-rendered source.

IE View

While Firefox is the choice of a large number of website builders, Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser with the general public.

This extension adds a "View page in Internet Explorer" option to the content and link context menu. This provides an easy way to compare how browsers render pages, in addition to making it easy to handle legacy web pages that are IE-specific.

But Wait - There's More!

This is just scratching the surface of the extensions that are available for Firefox. Some other extensions that are worth checking out include: Table Inspector, Fangs Screen Reader Emulator, CustomizeGoogle, Add N Edit Cookies and Amazing webpage emailer.

A directory of Firefox plug-ins is available at the Mozilla site.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Firefox Extensions Site

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