Three essential Firefox extensions for web developers
Firefox is beloved by web developers for its compliance with W3C standards, its open-source nature, and its general awesomeness. But its vast library of genuinely useful extensions and Greasemonkey scripts is surely a big part of the attraction, too. Here are three that I couldn't live without.
- You probably already know about the Web Developer Toolbar, but if you don't, trust me—go download it now.
Its most valuable feature is the ability to view the generated source of a page—that is, to see the HTML as it exists at the current moment, including any changes that have been made via JavaScript. It's absolutely indispensible for any kind of AJAX-ish work.
It can do a lot more than that, though—with a couple of clicks, you can validate documents, see what your page looks like at different resolutions, quickly view or delete cookies from only the current domain or path, view overlays which reveal various aspects of the document (such as the names of form fields or information about links), disable images or CSS, autopopulate forms to accelerate testing, and much more.
- JSView. How many times have you needed to view the stylesheets or JavaScript files that are used on a page—and had to hunt through the page source for the filenames, so you could cobble them together to get a complete URL?
JSView adds a submenu to the context menu which lists all stylesheets and JavaScript files linked to a page, along with the file sizes. Selecting a file from the menu will display the source in a new window. What JavaScript library are they using on that page? How did they get that effect with CSS? JSView makes it easier than ever to find out.
- Live HTTP Headers. Very handy when you want to see exactly what the browser and the server are saying to each other—complete with HTTP status codes, POST data, and request and response headers.
It's helped me to diagnose obscure bugs, to understand the workings of third-party web applications (such as when working with Microsoft products, which tend to freak out if the headers aren't set exactly as expected), to discover the URLs of embedded media files so I can download them (even on sites which obfuscate the URLs through various means), and more.
Comments
No comments yet.