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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If there’s more than one of each, you then get to choose whether to open all of them or just the one: to open individual files, select each one from the View menu. To open them all at the same time, either select them from the contextual menu or by using the optional toolbar buttons.
10 Execute JS
http://www.rudolf-noe.de/executejs.htm
The usual rule of working when developing JavaScript is to write your script, upload it to a server, and then load the page into a browser. If the script works, that’s great. Otherwise, you use a JavaScript console to work out where the error was.
Execute JS removes a lot of this tedium by enabling you to apply JavaScript directly to a page. A console provides the results of any actions and you can find the properties of objects on the page. You can modify functions on the fly: search, load, edit and eventually save them when you’re done. Execute JS also has a couple of other useful time-saving functions: a history of all your code snippets and a shortcut notation for frequently used elements.
11 SEO Links extension
http://www.seopen.com/firefox-extension/index.php
Search engine optimisation doesn’t stop with meta tags. Crafting a page to make it search engine-friendly is both an art and a science and there are many things that can affect a page’s search engine ranking. The SEO Links extension, which provides both a contextual menu and a toolbar, collects a number of online tools in one place so you can easily check your progress.
As well as some features found in some of these other extensions, SEO Links can work out the keywords you might want to use, tell you what the server’s robot.txt file says, the page’s file size, whether it’s included in the DMOZ directory, how many incoming links the page has, where it rates in Google’s PageRank and much more.
12 Add N Edit Cookies
http://www.addneditcookies.mozdev.org
Most cookie managers let you view cookies. Some let you delete cookies. But for anyone who wants to edit their cookies during testing, Add N Edit Cookies is the extension of choice. It works with both session and saved cookies and has a filter system for finding the cookie you want quickly.
One extra feature that you don’t get in most cookie managers either is, as the name of the extension suggests, the ability to add cookies for any domain you choose. That’s a boon for anyone wanting to test their site with varied cookie settings without the hassle of going to log-in screens. But it’s also a great way to test just how good your security is against someone who can hack their cookies.
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