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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Short of clicking on every link in a web page or running a spider over your site, it’s almost impossible to check for dead links, especially if you have quite a large links library. Using LinkChecker, simply right-click on the page or select LinkChecker from the Tools menu and it will verify all the links on the current page to see if they work.
It will colour-code each checked link: red for one that’s broken; yellow for forbidden or forwarded to another URL; green for okay; and grey if it had to skip the link for some reason. It’s clever enough not to try email links and any other kind of link that doesn’t lead to a standard web server.
7 MetaTags Sidebar
http://excode.com/metatags/mozilla.html
You may have the best site in the world, but if no one visits it, you might as well not have bothered. Meta tags are embedded in the top of HTML pages to give search engines a better idea what the site is about, as well as provide copyright and other information.
The MetaTags extension provides a sidebar that contains all the information stored in the current page’s meta tags, but in an easy-to-read format. If the site has keywords designed for specific searches, you can right-click those keywords to bring up a list of options, including searching the various bidding services for the current ad prices. There are also links to site submission services and the Alexa traffic monitoring service.
8 DevBoi
http://devboi.mozdev.org
Anyone coding CSS files will have had moments when they can’t quite recall the exact syntax for a style or which browsers support it – it’s just par for the course. Then there’s entity tables, HTML, XHTML, PHP, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, DOM… So much to remember, so many other things to do.
DevBoi is a handy sidebar for coders that gives you instant access to all the manuals you’ve ever wished you had but couldn’t get your hands on just when you needed them the most. Simply launch it from the Tools menu and then doubleclick on the element in which you’re interested to bring up the right manual page. Suddenly, coding becomes a whole lot easier…
9 JSView
http://www.scorpiondb.com/firefox/extensions/jsview
With AJAX on just about everyone’s to-do list these days, decent JavaScript and CSS tools are a must for any developer. Most browsers only offer the option of viewing the source code of a page and you’d normally have to ferret through the code to find links to external files and then open them separately. JSView will open all the external CSS and JavaScript files linked to by a web page in their own windows.
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