Essential List on Firefox Extensions for Webmaster
The Essential List and Resources on Firefox Extensions is a popular post here, due to one reason - Firefox has too many extensions and it is difficult and time consuming for a user who just wanted to install some cool extensions to get started on their Firefox journey. Because our original list was more toward normal and daily usage - and being a part time webmaster and blogger, I want to introduce some of the extensions I used to assist my webmaster responsibilities and tasks. Oh yes, I will only display extensions that save my web developing time for other tasks and projects in my life. Same drill here - I am going to list some must have, should have and good to have extensions, based on my experience and usage:
Must Have:
- Aardvark - Very useful tool to view elements within the HTML, view source code on specific element, select and remove block by block within the page.
- IE Tab - Embed Internet Explorer into Firefox. This is ultra convenient extension to test your page compatibility with just a click away.
- Performancing - “Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.”
- Search Status - Puts Google PageRank and Alexa popularity ranking on the status bar to quickly view the link importance of the site easily.
- Web Developer - Many features just for web developer. One of the best features is to edit CSS source and display live changes.
- ColorZilla - Quick way to pick color from any pages (text or image) and get its color hex code.
- DevBoi - A sidebar offers easy access to web-development documentations and reference manuals (HTML4, CSS2, DOM2, XUL). Very neat way to get reference on syntax especially for CSS.
Should Have:
- MeasureIt - A ruler to analyze website layouts. This is very useful small tool to get the right measurement for your web layout.
- Platypus - “lets you modify a Web page from your browser — “What You See Is What You Get” — and then save those changes as a Greasemonkey script so that they’ll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Editing pages to suit your needs is dandy — but making those changes “permanent” is the real payoff.”
- LiveHTTPHeaders - View and manipulate header request.
- LiveLines - Change the RSS subscription from default live bookmark to web services such as Bloglines and NewsGator Online, and RSS reader extensions(Sage, Habari Xenu). Quick way to subscribe any feed for your daily research.
Good to Have:
- SEOpen - Add a set of menu links for search engine optimization, such as quick links to Alexa, DMOZ, HTML Validator, etc.
- User Agent Switcher Extension - able to switch the user agent of the browser.
- UrlParams - Quick utility to debug GET/POST parameters.
Now, it’s your turn - what are your favorite extensions for web development? Any extensions that I should install and update this list?


Comments
Shantanu Oak says on December 30th, 2005 at 12:34 am
Firefox is web-master friendly out of the box.
I use 3 default features.
1) “View selection source” option on right click after selecting a portion from the page.
2) Tools - Page Info option where I get more info like page size, modified on, form info, image list etc.
3) I found “JavaScript Console” from Tools menu to be useful as well.
France says on December 30th, 2005 at 1:52 am
Shantanu brought up an important point with View Selection Source. I would list as “should have” View Rendered Source Chart. It’s especially helpful when manipulating the DOM.
Richard Davies says on December 30th, 2005 at 5:25 am
Here are some more useful extensions that I use for my web dev/design work:
Add N Edit Cookies
Console^2
DNSStuff Toolbar
HTML Validator
IE Tab
JavaScript Debugger
LoremIpsum Content Generator
OperaView
PageZoom
Reload Every
Screen grab
SessionSaver
Tamper Data
5m0k3 says on December 30th, 2005 at 6:32 am
You may also find these essential blogging tools helpful:
http://techblaster.blogspot.co.....tools.html
Vivek says on December 30th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Is there a DOM inspector extension ?It was included by default in Mozilla but firefox has removed it.I was wondering if there are any extensions for that.
Linky is another useful extension thats nice to have ,esp the “show all images in 1 tab” thing.
http://gemal.dk/mozilla/linky.html
Ivan Minic says on December 30th, 2005 at 5:16 pm
Good stuff.
One of the best lists of this type I’ve seen.
Magicor says on December 30th, 2005 at 7:59 pm
Don’t forget “Check Page Links” extension.
Flack says on December 30th, 2005 at 10:51 pm
Some more: Screen grab!, Open Source in Tab, EditCSS.
http://flack.ru/2005/12/29/web.....refox-15-2
Descriptions and links (in Russian, sorry).
AlexS says on March 6th, 2006 at 7:06 am
Recently I’ve downloaded an exciting FireFox extension named Hyperwords. The extension does a lot of useful things, so I’ve already removed 3 other extensions! I think it will be very invaluable for almost everybody who uses web and for web masters, of course, too. It makes searching, blogging, bookmarking, emailing document fragments, translation between different languagues much faster than you could imagine it. I think it’s really worth to try it.
Douglas Clifton says on March 18th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Learn how to automatically list your installed extensions from a web page:
http://loadaveragezero.com/drx/installed
bj says on April 15th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
I’ve searched and cannot find an extension for Firefox 1.5 + that will save web pages as a web archive. There was an extension called MAF that allowed this for FF 1.0 but cannot find an update or a matching extension. Please help me find it - it must exist. Thank you.
Michael says on May 13th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Another good extention, for web devolopers is FireFTP, an FTP client that runs in FireFox. Very handy!
http://fireftp.mozdev.org/
Web idiot says on November 19th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Vivek, DOM inspector is again included in Firefox 2.0 by default. All you need is just press all together CTRL+SHIFT+I or just Tools - Dom Inspector.