Tag: firebug

The essential Firefox Plugins for the Web Developer

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 15, 2008

Nick has already posted about Firebug and Firebug Extensions and in my own experience in setting up my workstation I too found this to be an essential Firefox Add on. In addtion to Firebug, here are the other Firefox plugins I’ve already installed in my first few days of work on this new computer.

  • Delicious – An agile webmaster might know thousands of online resouces and having them on one computer in the form of browser book marks is not very agile is it? Using delicious you can take your bookmarks with you, and this was one of the first things I missed having: all my bookmarks.
  • SearchStatus – This plugin is essential for the SEO professional. It gives you Google pagerank, Alexa Rank and Compete rank information for the websites you visit and also has a useful keyword density analyzer and quick access to searches to find indexed pages, backlinks and cache. It’s one of the tools I use the most when investigating a website.
  • Web Developer Toolbar – While this was originally a must-have tool for its live css editing, Firebug has become much more useful for that purpose. But this tool is still very useful for a variety of other information and I also tend to use it a lot to quickly disable cache, cookies, or JavaScript.
  • ColorZilla – This gives you an easy color picker and an eyedropper that can be used to quickly get the color of anything on any webpage.
  • And of course, Firebug and YSlow as Nick has already blogged about.

Extending Firebug through plugins

Posted by Nick Ashley – July 30, 2008

It’s happened. My favorite Firefox plugin, firebug, is so useful and well-designed, that developers have decided to add on to it’s functionality through plugins. While these are still installed and managed the same as a normal Firefox plugin, they require firebug to be installed first. In fact, they are not extending the functionality of Firefox, they are extending firebug itself. They are plugins for a plugin.

It started (AFAIK) with Yslow. This plugin, developed by Yahoo!, analyzes the page, and determines why it is loading slowly. It is based on their own best practices for high performance websites. This is most likely not the type of tool you will use daily, but when you get to the optimization stage of a project it is very handy.

Just the other day, I had the need to analyze the cookies one of my sites was using, and to do so installed Firecookie. Overall I was impressed. It provides a dead-simple way to view, edit, and delete any cookies associated with a page. The one feature I wish it had, was the ability to temporarily disable cookies, without deleting them. This is handy if you want to quickly check what something looks like while logged out of a site, without having to actually log out, and then back in.

There are other firebug plugins I have yet to use, and I’m sure more are currently being developed. All of this added functionality strengthens my belief that firebug is becoming less of a nicety for developers, and more of a necessity. It is definitely one of the larger tools in my development toolbox.