Firefox has somewhere upwards of five thousand of addons that can do just about anything to make your browsing experience more enjoyable/productive/fun/whatever. The addons highlighted below are mostly for the technical aspects of web development and design, but be sure to check out FireFox’s full addon section for tons of other useful tools.
Developer Tools
- Web Developer Toolbar
This toolbar sits below the bookmarks toolbar and has options for viewing different parts of a given web page’s code construction. Lets you outline elements as you hover over them and see their CSS selector, edit HTML/CSS on the fly, resize the page to a given dimension, disable images, javascript, CSS, etc. This is a must-have. - Firebug
This addon expands from the bottom of your browser window, and allows you to view and debug CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live on any web page, and see the changes you make instantly. There’s also Firebug Lite for testing in Explorer, Opera, and Safari =D
Design Tools
- ColorZilla
ColorZilla is an eyedropper tool that allows you to click on any color you see in your browser, adjust the color, and paste the color code into other applications. Very helpful when you need to grab colors you see on the web to use in designs. - ScreenGrab
ScreenGrab is a screenshot tool that allows you to create an image from any selected area of your browser window, or the entire window you’re viewing, eliminating the need to stitch together multiple screenshots to show a whole web page. - MeasureIt
Very simple ruler that measures anything on the web. The icon sits on the bottom left of your window, and clicking on it brings up a tiny crosshair cursor which allows you to make a selection and then gives you the dimensions of your selection in pixels. - IE Tab
There are a few versions of IE Tab, but the original is still only compatible with Windows. This is a quick way to test a page in IE without having to do a full download of IE.
