Planet Jonny

Firefox is such a great web browser but what differentiates it from others is the ability to install add-ons/extensions. Ultimately this provides you with a custom browsing “experience” that you can’t really find anywhere else. At work though, Firefox is less of a browser and more of a tool I use to get my work done. I thought I’d share the extensions that I use daily (in no particular order).

• Firebug is an extension for us web developers that allows them to edit/inspect all different aspects of a page. It gives us the ability to modify a page in real time and see what our changes instantly. Some of the features include editing HTML, debugging javascript, editing CSS, and more.
  A few essential add-ons that require firebug are Firecookie (cookie editor) and YSlow (developed by Yahoo to analyze the speediness of your page).
• NoScript is an extension that blocks javascript from running. Javascript is a great resource that brings the web pages alive but it can also cause some serious problems. Malicious scripts can take over your browser (there is a certain “rickroll” website that does this) and possibly even your computer. Not to mention poorly written scripts that can crash the browser as well. Unfortunately as my work requires me to do a lot of research on the internet, I can’t trust every site I visist.
  My only gripe: I wish there was a feature that allowed me to enable/block on an IP-address basis. Since my job requires me to manage 1000+ domains, it gets tiring allowing every site as I visit them.
• ShowIP is an extension that displays the IP address of the current site. Since I work with 1000’s of domains, some of which may or may not be pointed at our servers, using ShowIP I can easily determine if the page I’m looking at is hosted by us or by another server.
• Tamper Data is another work essential application. It basically shows you all HTTP requests that the browser is making. You can view the headers of the request and the response. The awesome thing is that you can tamper with the request before its sent out. Another decent one is LiveHTTPHeaders but the interface in Tamper Data makes it far superior.
  One gripe: I wish I could pause the extension. When I have the window open, ALL http requests and request streams get added to the window. Sometimes I only care about one request stream and want to pause it so no other request streams get added to the window… but I can’t.
• Web Developer toolbar. I dont know any web developer that doesnt have this install on their machine. It has so many features I can’t list them all here. Install this one quick.
• ColorZilla is a very easy to use extension that turns the mouse into an eye-dropper tool allowing you to get the hex value of any color on the page.
• MeasureIt is another simple to use extension. This one enables you to measure (in pixels) anything on the page. Need to know the dimensions of the div? MeasureIt will tell you.
• FoxyProxy is a proxy management extension for Firefox. At my job, we have a development server, a staging server, and a production server. If a client is experiencing any issues, I can easily flip on FoxyProxy, point it to the staging or development servers and debug it in real time. FoxyProxy probably has a lot more features than what I’m using it for but whatever.
• CSSViewer is a helpful extension for viewing CSS rules applied to particular elements on the page. I don’t use this one anymore but I listed it here because it can be handy. When enabled, you can mouse over any element on the page and see what CSS rules are being applied to it. Its handy when needing to find a CSS issue. I believe you can find the same information using Firebug but

Thats about it? Did I leave any out? Lemme know.

Computers, Software addons, extensions, firefox, Internet, web development