14 Firefox plugins for today’s web developer
By wfrench | March 7, 2008
When it comes to bells and whistles I tend to be a minimalist. All that eye candy is just too expensive with regard to system resources. So when rebuilt one of my workstations I was shocked when I found 15 plugins installed. The only saving grace is that I acutally use almost every plugin installed on a daily basis as a web application developer.
For posterity here is my list. If I’m missing any good plugins leave a comment.
| Plugin | Description |
|---|---|
| Web Developer | This is a great plugin for changing various browser settings and has several visual tags. However, my favorite feature is the ability to turn caching on and off. |
| Firebug | By far the #1 most useful tool for web development. It has a full javascript debugger with watches and breakpoints, a CSS browser that you can update dynamically, and much more! It can cause some slow downs on some website, but it can be disabled. |
| Foxmarks Synchronizer | This plugin is right up my alley! Simple, elegant, and peforms what it does very well with few bells and whistles. Foxmarks will synchronize your bookmarks between several different computers. Seeing that I work with at least 4 computers on a regular basis, this is a life saver! |
| IE Tab | Now I know there are some Microsoft haters out there, but the simple fact of life is that IE is still one of the most widely used browsers on the market. That means you should still test your site in IE and this plugin will let you open an IE browser window in firefox. |
| Live HTTP Headers | Back in the day I used this plugin quite a bit when I was doing client/serer applications. It’s great for watching a series of HTTP requests and their result codes. |
| Switch Proxy Tool | I like setting up a transparent web proxy to access my development servers. This way you can access your development box using the same url as your production box and by using a proxy you don’t need to do any hostname spoofing on the client. Switch proxy allows you to easily switch between different proxies. |
| Gmail Manager | To be honest, I shouldn’t like use this plugin over the Gmail Notifier because it’s feature rich and doesn’t focus on simplicity. However, it does let me manage multiple account, has an email preview, and several other cool features. It’s a nice mix between features and functionallity. |
| All-in-One Gestures | Control browser navigation with mouse movements. Way cool, but the only downside is that you will want to use these gestures everywhere after a while. |
| Download Statusbar | If you aren’t a fan of the download status window popping up everytime you download something then this is the plugin for you. All your downloads show in your browsers status bar. |
| FaviconizeTab | While this isn’t directly related to web development I think it’s pretty cool. You can shrink a tab down to it’s favicon so it doesn’t clutter up your tab bar. I use this for my streaming audio sites. |
| Minimize to Tray | Another very simple but useful plugin. Eliminate clutter in your taskbar by minimizing firefox to the system tray instead of the taskbar. The only enhancement that might be useful is the ability to selectivly minimize to the tray. |
| Tabscope | This plugin is the closest thing to eye candy that I have installed. If you hover over a non-active tab a preview window will pop up in a javascript window. This is helpful if your’re working on several pages at once. |
| Tab Mix Plus | If you are like me you have several tabs (10 - 20) open on a regular basis. This plugin provides better management of these tabs. |
| Pearl Crescent Page Saver | Submitting bugs is much easier using this plugin. It’s very simple and you can even setup a hot key for catching those mouse rollovers. |
Topics: Development |
April 1st, 2008 at 12:49 pm
A great list with one caveat.
I added a bunch of these and Firefox (2.0.1.13) started behaving really badly and was almost unusable as the memory usage went through the roof.
After a bit of hunting around I found that disabling Firebug restored things to normal. I guess I’ll enable Firebug only when I need it and watch and hope for an update that fixes the memory issues.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:16 pm
You are correct genesis. Firebug is a resource hog and should only be enabled for sites you are developing. It is known to break some sites or cause poor performance on others, i.e. gmail. Thanks for the clarification.