20 Firefox Add-ons to Enhance your Web Development

There are lots of free extensions and add-ons available on the internet for Firefox, but which are the best add-ons that can Really help you as a web developer or designer in terms of time and effort?

Many of our readers suggested some great add-ons in our previous post, Designer´s Toolbox : 15+ Time Saving Tools- What´s your Secret? . Today i would like to highlight your suggestions and other add-ons that will help make your web development process quicker and more productive. So here’s 20 extremely useful Firefox Add-ons that can help developers create websites more efficiently.

You might be interested to check other related posts for more useful tools:

• 13+ Fantastic Tools For Knowing How They’re Doing It
• Handy Designer’s Tools “On The Fly”
• 23+ Impressive Tools for Faster Javascript/Ajax Development

1-InspectorWidget

Adds toolbar button and context menus for invoking the DOM Inspector (DOMi) for either chrome or content elements.

2-Web Developer

Suggested by Jon Aizlewood from http://www.carbongraffiti.com/ and Mike Smith from http://www.blogthememachine.com/

A very useful add-on, adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

3-IE View

Lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to *always* load in IE.

4-TinyUrl Creator

Easy shrink any long URL or link in the page to something you can email or Twitter using the TinyUrl service with a single click in your browser.

5-EditCSS

Stylesheet modifier in the Sidebar.

6- View formatted source

Ever wanted to know the style of every element of the page without having to view the .css file, here is the best add-on to let you view the style on the fly. You can see exactly which CSS rules match for an element. The rules are displayed including file name and line number. The topmost element is that with the highest priority.

7- Firebug

One of the best add-ons. I can't recommend this plugin enough! You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. You will even learn CSS if you use it.

8- Image Download

Suggested by Rachel from http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/

This ad-on download All the Picuture In the Page, helps speed up image downloads. Also you can filter images by width ,height, type.

9- JavaScript Debugger

Provides a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers.

10- Greasemonkey

This is a must have extension! Your Internet experience totally changes after this. Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org.

11- JSView

All browsers include a "View Source" option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. You can use the JSView extension to solve the problem. If the website you are viewing contains any external js/css files, an icon will appear that says "SS", "JS", or both. Each individual file can then be viewed by clicking on the filename. The file will be opened in a new window.

12- Html Validator

HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.

13- ColorZilla

An Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker and Page Zoomer. Allows you to get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. Also you can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.

14- LinkChecker

Check the validity of links on any webpage.

15- FireFTP

Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more!

16- Codetch

Get the feel of Dreamweaver in a Firefox extension. Edit your documents right next to your web pages as you surf.

17- YSlow

Suggested by Jacob Gube of http://sixrevisions.com/

YSlow is the what missing in Firebug. Now you can Easily find out the slower Component on your page and Correcting it.It analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites.

18- FireShot

Adds the ability to take a screenshot of web page (entire of visible part), edit it, add annotations and upload to server, save (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), print (NEW!) copy to clipboard, send to external editor or e-mail it.

19- Pixel Perfect

A Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML.

20- Snapper

Snapper allows users to designate an area of a web page for a focused snapshot, cutting out the additional work needed for cropping unecessary information.