January 18th, 2006 | 2 Comments

My Firefox Extensions

Myself and little cuz Joe have recently started work on a new site for him (replacing the often neglected Homiesheaven), and along the way I seem to have finally converted him to the joys of Firefox.

“that was the quickest and easiest install EVER!.. How many tabs can I have open at the same time?! Wow!”*

So that’s a good start. But Joe, Firefox has a lot more to offer, the major benefit being the extensions you can add to it which make Firefox so much more than just a web browser.

Here, in no particular order, are the extensions that I currently use - am I missing any gems that I’d find useful?

• DOM Inspector - installed as standard in Firefox, this extension can be used to inspect and edit the Document Object Model of any web document. Rarely use this at the moment, to be honest.
• HTML Validator - invaluable for checking that code validates, and for help with fixing errors in HTML.
• ColorZilla - find the colour from any part of a web document - useful for helping remember what colour you’ve chosen for a certain part of a website, or just for finding the HEX value of a colour you like.
• Tabbrower Preferences - take full control of your tabs.
• Web Developer Toolbar - the absolute king of Firefox extensions. No web developer should be without it, as there’s nothing better for helping tweak your pages and deconstructing other websites. No surprise it generally comes bundled in the Firefox installation.
• Google PageRank - I know, PageRank is effectively dead, but there’s still something reassuring about seeing that little green bar pop up when viewing a site.
• Greasemonkey - another under-used extension, which allows you to alter the behaviour of certain websites (assign them “user scripts”).
• Customize Google - adds links to other search results on Google’s search results pages, plus a whole lot more gubbins which is mainly used by those that think giving all your data to Google is a crime. This extension is currently “up for eviction” frankly, because it doesn’t add much value.
• MeasureIt - a new addition; where I previously used ScreenCalipers to measure objects on screen, I now have MeasureIt, which is much handier and quicker to use.
• SessionSaver - another new addition, but this looks like it’s going to be invaluable for getting back to pages that have been closed by accident or from a browser crash.
• SpellBound - checks spelling in web forms. Must remember to use it more when blogging.
• Screen Grab - great plugin for taking screenshots of entire web pages. Requires JAva to run.
• Fasterfox - allows you to tweak Firefox for better performance.
• IE Tab - see how your design looks in Internet Explorere without having to open it.
• Adsense Notifier - here’s one for stats junkies - if you find yourself logging in to your Adsense account regularly, this extension will show your clicks and earnings in your Firefox taskbar, and will update as regularly as you wish.

So there you go, hopefully both you and Joe will have found something that will be useful to you in that list.

* Or words to that effect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 9:54 am and is filed under Firefox, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.