The best Firefox extensions for developers
- Article 1 of 3
- .net, May 2006
Firefox has now been downloaded 165,123,014 times, inspiring hundreds of fantastic extensions. Rob Buckley presents the fifteen you really can't afford to miss.
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3 Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/fangs
The Mozilla Accessibility Extension works best in conjunction with the Fangs Screen Reader Emulator. Fangs is the most popular of the screen readers that are used by vision-impaired web surfers, and the Fangs Screen Reader Emulator gives you the next best thing: a stream of text which is identical to that which Fangs would read out when presented with your web page.
Accessible directly from the Tools menu, it’ll also give you a list of the headings that Fangs would pick up, as well as a list of links, presented in exactly the same order that Fangs would read them out. Note well, however, this extension is only compatible with Firefox 1.0 at the moment – check back later for updates.
4 FireBug
http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/
FireBug is a useful improvement on the built-in Firefox debugging systems. It splits a Firefox window into two parts: the top half, which is dedicated to the web page itself, and the bottom half, which works as a console, complete with its own menus. It flashes up errors, combining an HTML and CSS validator, Firefox’s JavaScript Console and DOM Inspector, together with a command line JavaScript interpreter.
One extra-useful feature for AJAX developers that’s not enabled by default is the XMLHttpRequest Spy. This monitors the various web services messages that go between Firefox and the web server that’s running the AJAX application, making debugging a whole lot easier.
5 ColorZilla
http://www.iosart.com/firefox/colorzilla
Making sure page elements have matching colours and aren’t just a shade or two different can be time consuming, particularly if you’re comparing images with text, for example.
ColorZilla works like the eyedropper tool in Photoshop and other graphics programs, by enabling you to sample the colours of any element, whether it’s been coded or is in an image. Just click on the tool, then mouse over anything to find its colour value. ColorZilla will also report the distance between where you clicked and the current mouse position. And just to make sure you’re clicking in the right place, there’s a zoom feature that can magnify the page 1,000 per cent.
6 LinkChecker
http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker
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