28 Useful Firefox Addon Extensions for Web Development

Written by Kevin Liew on 30 Apr 2012
22,374 Views • Browser

Introduction

Firefox is one of the famous browsers in web development industry mainly because of its wide array of web development tools such as Firebug. Before Chrome, Firefox has gained most of the attention and considered as the best alternative against its rival - Internet Explorer because it renders DOM and layout quite consistently despite of different releases. Personally, I'm toggling between Firefox and Chrome because I way too used to Firebug's interface. As a result, I have been using Firefox for web development and Chrome as a secondary browser, mainly for Google's web app (gmail, igoogle, analytics) and webkit rendering (CSS 3D, WebGL). In case you missed it, I did a comprehensive Google Chrome Web Development Extensions Round up last week.

This time, I've browsed through Firefox Add-on page and handpicked 28 Add-ons that could help you to debug, test and speed up development process. Some of them you may already familiar with such as Web developer tools and firebug. And other could be something you have been looking for.

  • Firebug If you are a web developer, you need 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...
  • NoScript The best security you can get in a web browser! Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks.
  • Web Developer The Web Developer extension adds various web developer tools to a browser.
  • FireFTP FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP/SFTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP/SFTP servers.
  • FireSSH FireSSH is a free, cross-platform SSH terminal client for Mozilla Firefox. Written entirely in Javascript!
  • User Agent Switcher The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of a browser.
  • ColorfulTabs The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface.
  • ColorZilla Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Gradient Generator and other colorful goodies...
  • iMacros Automate Firefox. Record and replay repetitious work. If you love the Firefox web browser, but are tired of repetitive tasks like visiting the same sites every days, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, then iMacros for Firefox is the solution you’ve been dreaming of!
  • Live HTTP Headers View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
  • DOM Inspector DOM Inspector is a tool that can be used to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. The DOM can be navigated using a two-paned window displaying a variety of different views on the document and all nodes within.
  • YSlow YSlow analyzes web pages and why they're slow based on Yahoo!'s rules for high performance web sites.
  • ShowIP Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right click) and hostname (left click), like whois, netcraft, etc. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.
  • Pixel Grabber Grabbing screens and pulling images from the web just got a bit easier. With the Pixlr Grabber add-on, you can copy, save, share or even edit your final grabs - including any image or background - with just a right-click.
  • SQLite Manager Manage any SQLite database on your computer.
  • Autofill Forms Autofill Forms enables you to fill out web forms with one click or a keyboard shortcut.
  • HTTPFox An HTTP analyzer addon for Firefox
  • SeoQuake SEO Extension Seoquake is a Firefox SEO extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO) and internet promotion. Seoquake allows to investigate many important SEO parameters.
  • JSONView View JSON documents in the browser.
  • Clear Status Easy cache status & management from status...
  • Tilt 3D A WebGL-based 3D visualization of a webpage.
  • LinkChecker Check the validity of links on any webpage.
  • Font Finder FontFinder is created for designers, developers and typographers. It allows a user to analyze the font information of any element on a page, copy any piece(s) of that information to the clipboard, and perform inline replacements to test new layouts.
  • Total Validator Perform many different validations in one go. This multiple validator works with external, internal, or local web pages.
  • Javascript Deminifier This addon will deminify javascript before it is downloaded. This is useful when using firebug to debug a javascript application that uses javascript that has been minified.
  • Regular Expressions Tester Testing tool for regular expressions with color highlighting (including submatches) and helpers for creating expressions.
  • PHP Developer Toolbar Stop searching at PHP.net to simply remember some function signature. With this addon you can search functions quickly for the official function description directly into your browser without a new tab.Plus, many tools to help PHP developers.
  • Header Spy Shows HTTP headers on statusbar.
Join the discussion

Comments will be moderated and rel="nofollow" will be added to all links. You can wrap your coding with [code][/code] to make use of built-in syntax highlighter.

3 comments
Logoswish 13 years ago
Very useful article. Thank you for this collection.
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Walter Amaya 13 years ago
Great collection!, Now I am using various that I unknown.
Reply
chandran 10 years ago
super vector images....... thanks
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