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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13 UrlParams
http://www.urlparams.blogwart.com/share/index.php
Virtually every site with any interactivity uses forms. Testing a form to see what it has submitted usually involves inspecting the page content or the server headers, then backing up and re-submitting new information with the original form, once it’s reloaded.
UrlParams provide a sidebar that gives you a way to cut through all of that. It shows you what fields and data a form has submitted to the server and gives you a chance to alter resubmit it. And it works with both GET and POST forms.
What lifts it up beyond the likes of LiveHTTPHeaders and other similar extensions – beyond the ability to edit and drop form fields – is the layout. It’s just so much readable than all the options.
14 Table Inspector
http://www.juicystudio.com/article/firefox-table-inspector.php
Even though everyone worth their salt dropped table-based layouts years ago, table mark-up still gets used for, surprisingly enough, displaying tables. There’s plenty of scope within HTML mark-up for making data tables accessible, using tags such as summary, headers, axis, scope, and abbr. But that code remains invisible when viewed in a regular browser.
The Table Inspector Firefox extension makes the invisible visible. Essentially, once you activate it from the Tools menu or contextual menu. You’ll be able to see summaries, scopes and everything else appear highlighted in boxes, making table-management much easier and more pleasant to cope with.
15 Clear Cache Button
http://www.tinyurl.com/qetcb
Firefox’s cache is supposed to speed up everyday browsing (which it does), but when you’re in the midst of updating a web site’s pages and media files, it also means you end up having to hit refresh whenever you land on a page you’ve already visited to flush out the cached versions of all those files.
That’s when you wish you could opt to ditch that cache. Simple, but still extremely useful for anyone updating files on a server regularly, the Clear Cache button lets you empty Firefox’s cache instantly. To enable the button, use View - Toolbars - Customise… to bring up the toolbar customisation procedure. Then all you have to do is drag the button to the toolbar and click OK.
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