my favorite firefox extensions for software development

Over the years I have utilized a variety of Firefox extensions and the following are a compilation of my favorites. I have found these to be the most useful, easy to use, stable, and a necessity for how I develop software each day. Each extension outlined below links to the extension page on the Mozilla website and includes both the developer and my comments on how I have found the extension useful.

• ColorZilla - With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.
  • I have used this many times to confirm color selections on various web pages as well as pull ideas from customer images. One feature I found to be very helpful is that it allows you to copy various color values to the clip board to be pasted into other apps. It also integrates into firebug.
    
• Video DownloadHelper - DownloadHelper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites. Just surf the Web as you are used to, when DownloadHelper detects it can do something for you, the icon gets animated and a menu allows you to download files by simply clicking an item. For instance, if you go to a YouTube page, you'll be able to download the video directly on your file system. It also works with MySpace, Google videos, DailyMotion, Porkolt, iFilm, DreamHost and others.
  • One of the easiest ways I have found to directly download video content from the web, especially youtube.
• FEBE - FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up -- It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers.
  • This is a must, especially if you like tinkering with new ones as well as playing around with each of your extension settings.
• Firebug - Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
  • This has got to be one of the best extensions for developers out there. It comes bundled with a variety of helpful tools, especially for examining what exactly is going on behind the scenes inside of the application or website your working on. A Must Have!!!
• Forecastfox - Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or status bar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.
  • If you like keeping on top of your local weather this small utility is very helpful. It can be customized to show your +5 day outlook as well as the type of weather icons you would like to use. It has saved me from getting rained on many many times.
• FoxyTunes - FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.
  • I found this to be very useful when clicking to the next track ringing in my ear, especially with long hours of coding.
• GMarks - GMarks includes a sidebar, a toolbar, a quick search with Home+Home similar to Google Desktop's Ctrl+Ctrl search, and full content search of your bookmarked pages. GMarks supports nested labels with a customizable separator. It has a toolbar button which turns yellow when the page is bookmarked and when middle clicked can add/remove the site. GMarks also adds a tab to the Firefox add bookmark window to add bookmarks directly to the Google Bookmarks site. Also included are filters, which can be used for both batch editing and for automatically adding descriptions and labels to new bookmarks, and an Organize GMarks window with inline editing of bookmarks. GMarks allows for easy migration to and from Google Bookmarks. You can import your Firefox bookmarks to Google or export your Google Bookmarks to a bookmarks.htm file. GMarks is completely separate from your Firefox bookmarks and does not remove or hide them.
  • This is another Must Have!!!! If you are using Google Bookmarks to keep track of the 1000s of bookmarks you have and locate on a daily basis, this small utility hooks into your Google Account, and allows you to access them via a side bar menu similar to the Firefox bookmarks left hand menu. When links are updated, added, deleted, etc. your Google Bookmarks account is synced to these changes.
• LinkedIn Companion - The Firefox Companion brings you immediate access to your LinkedIn network as you browse and read email.
  • You have the capability to access your LinkedIn account via a handy toolbar as well as search for LinkedIn contacts and jobs via the 2 additional LinkedIn search types in Firefox's search bar.
• MeasureIt - Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a web page.
  • This small tool is especially helpful when you are trying to layout elements and designing new web pages.
• ScribeFire Blog Editor - ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.
  • This extension is very easy to use and taps into Myspace, Blogger, as well as many others allowing you to add content to your blog directly in Firefox.
• Selenium IDE - Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.
  • If you are interested in unit tests and simplifying your testing procedures check out this extension. Instead of me attempting to explain the benefits and a little of how to use it, check out this presentation to the Coldfusion Meetup Group by John Paul Ashenfelter: click here.
• Tab Mix Plus - Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.
  • Another Must Have!!! The primary reason I use this extension is to save clicks when I start to work each day. If your like me and you use the same windows + tabs each day this extension is perfect for you. Basically you set everything up the way you like it and take snapshot saving the session which can be a single or multiple windows. When you have to restart or startup Firefox you can restore your selected session with a single click!!!!! Awesome!! You can also add play with your tab settings such as size, color, etc.
• Web Developer - Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • Just like Firebug, this extension is a must have!!! This toolbar gives developers the capability of manipulating cookies, css, forms, images, and a ton of other items when working with or interacting with a web page. Another key feature I have used many times when designing layouts is the resize tab. For example I work on a 1920x1200 resolution, however, most users use 1024x768. You can configure browser dimensions and use this menu to resize your browser window to those configured dimensions. By changing the size of your browser you can see what your creating will look like in different resolutions.
• YSlow - YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites.
  • No explanation Necessary!!! Another Must Have!!