Stuart Herbert On PHP

… as recommended by readers of Planet PHP

Most Recommendations

There were six Firefox extensions that folks repeatedly recommended …

1. ColorZilla - advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and other colorful goodies.
2. FireBug - live DOM & CSS inspector.  The single greatest web developer add-on for Firefox.
3. Live HTTP Headers - view HTTP headers of a page and whilst browsing.
4. Web Developer Toolbar - adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
5. YSlow - Yahoo’s tool for analysing web pages and telling you why they are slow.  Requires Firebug.
6. Zend Studio Toolbar - debugging assistance for Zend Studio 5.5 and earlier.  Isn’t mentioned on the Zend Studio 6 pages, so does that mean it is now obsolete?

… and after that, there was a lot of variety amongst the other extensions that were recommended.

Also Recommended

1. Cache Status - easy cache status & management from the status bar.
2. ChatZilla - IRC client for Firefox.
3. Duplicate Tab - clone a tab along with its history.
4. Edit Cookies - edit your cookies right in Firefox.
5. Fasterfox - performance and network tweaks for Firefox.
6. Firefox Accessibility Extension - test your web pages for functional accessibility features based on the iCITA HTML Best Practices.
7. FirePHP - print to your Firebug console using a simple PHP function call.
8. FireShot - take screenshots of web pages, and a whole lot more.
9. Google Toolbar - Google’s famous in-browser search toolbar.
10. GreaseMonkey - customise the way a web page displays using your own Javascript add-ons.  See also Lifehacker’s Top 10 Greasemonkey User Scripts, and their Better GMail and Better Flickr add-ons to get an idea of just what can be done with Greasemonkey as a Firefox extension tool.
11. HTML Validator - add HTML validation to your browser.
12. IE Tab (Windows only) - open Firefox tabs using IE’s rendering engine.  See also the popular IE View alternative.
13. LocationBar2 - adds additional features to Firefox’s address bar.
14. Lorem Ipsum content generator - Generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text, for when you need to fill a page with content for testing purposes.  
15. MeasureIt - draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any element on the web page.
16. NagiosChecker - see the status of your services and servers in Firefox’s status bar.  You do monitor your servers, right?
17. PrefBar - power user toolbar for Firefox.  
18. Regular Expressions Tester - testing tool for regular expressions with colour highlighting.
19. RefSpoof - easy spoofing of the HTTP referrer header.
20. ReloadEvery - reloads a web page every so many seconds.
21. Save Session - save your current browser windows & tabs for the next time you open Firefox.
22. Scrapbook - save web pages locally and easily manage collections.  (Like OS X web archives, as supported by Together, DevonThink, and so on, but cross-platform).
23. Selenium IDE - record, edit and debug tests for Selenium, the automated UI testing tool for web developers.  See also PHPUnit’s support for Selenium.  You do have reproducible testing for you web apps, right?
24. Stylish - fix ugly sites, customise the look of your browser or mail client by using your own CSS files.  Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to Javascript.
25. Tab Mix Plus - tab management on steroids.
26. Tamper Data - view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and POST parameters.
27. TimestampDecode - treats the selected number as a timestamp and displays a decoded date/time.
28. TitlebarTweaks - tweak Firefox’s titlebar text.
29. User Agent Switcher - Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
30. Venkman - Javascript debugger for Firefox.

Stu’s Recommends

To round off the list, here are a few extensions that I find useful, but which weren’t recommended.  If you haven’t heard of these before, give them a try.

1. Flagfox - display a country flag in the status bar for the location of the current website’s server.
2. Server Switcher - easily switch between development and production servers.
3. Show MyIP - display your current external IP address. 
4. SQLite Manager - Manage any SQLIte database on your computer.

Are you a web developer?  Got a favourite Firefox extension that isn’t on this list?  Let us know in the comments below.

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