40 Firefox Extensions Every Web Developer Should Check Out
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 6:26 AM, Mon 16 Jun 08
Filed under: 1 - Beginner, 2 - Intermediate, 3 - Advanced, Toolbox
18 Comments
… as recommended by readers of Planet PHP 
Most Recommendations
There were six Firefox extensions that folks repeatedly recommended …
- ColorZilla - advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and other colorful goodies.
- FireBug - live DOM & CSS inspector. The single greatest web developer add-on for Firefox.
- Live HTTP Headers - view HTTP headers of a page and whilst browsing.
- Web Developer Toolbar - adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
- YSlow - Yahoo’s tool for analysing web pages and telling you why they are slow. Requires Firebug.
- 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
- Cache Status - easy cache status & management from the status bar.
- ChatZilla - IRC client for Firefox.
- Duplicate Tab - clone a tab along with its history.
- Edit Cookies - edit your cookies right in Firefox.
- Fasterfox - performance and network tweaks for Firefox.
- Firefox Accessibility Extension - test your web pages for functional accessibility features based on the iCITA HTML Best Practices.
- FirePHP - print to your Firebug console using a simple PHP function call.
- FireShot - take screenshots of web pages, and a whole lot more.
- Google Toolbar - Google’s famous in-browser search toolbar.
- 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.
- HTML Validator - add HTML validation to your browser.
- IE Tab (Windows only) - open Firefox tabs using IE’s rendering engine. See also the popular IE View alternative.
- LocationBar2 - adds additional features to Firefox’s address bar.
- Lorem Ipsum content generator - Generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text, for when you need to fill a page with content for testing purposes.
- MeasureIt - draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any element on the web page.
- NagiosChecker - see the status of your services and servers in Firefox’s status bar. You do monitor your servers, right?
- PrefBar - power user toolbar for Firefox.
- Regular Expressions Tester - testing tool for regular expressions with colour highlighting.
- RefSpoof - easy spoofing of the HTTP referrer header.
- ReloadEvery - reloads a web page every so many seconds.
- Save Session - save your current browser windows & tabs for the next time you open Firefox.
- 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).
- 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?
- 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.
- Tab Mix Plus - tab management on steroids.
- Tamper Data - view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and POST parameters.
- TimestampDecode - treats the selected number as a timestamp and displays a decoded date/time.
- TitlebarTweaks - tweak Firefox’s titlebar text.
- User Agent Switcher - Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
- 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.
- Flagfox - display a country flag in the status bar for the location of the current website’s server.
- Server Switcher - easily switch between development and production servers.
- Show MyIP - display your current external IP address.
- 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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18 Comments
June 16th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Well if i install all i think my firefox will get a bit “FAT” so he might be slow and get heart attacks easily
June 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
True, but you can always install, disable and just enable when the need arises on a development task
June 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Great list, I’m trying them all!
June 16th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
@Johny:
I’ve got about 15 of the ones listed installed plus about 7 that aren’t and FF loads pretty well on my machine. I’ve not seen too many crashes, either.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I really like “Add N Edit Cookies”
June 16th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
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June 16th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Firefox 3 comes out tomorrow, I hope many of these extensions get updated…
June 16th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Nice list! One I use a lot is Cookiepie (www.nektra.com/oss/firefox/extensions/cookiepie/), seems to be missed here!
Is really useful to log in into multiple accounts in a same site (like Gmail, and others)
Cheers!
June 17th, 2008 at 4:35 am
[...] 40 Firefox Extensions Every Web Developer Should Check Out (tags: webdev webdesign list firefox extensions tools) [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 4:40 am
I haven’t found a better cookie plugin than Firecookie. It’s a plugin for Firebug. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6683
June 17th, 2008 at 7:46 am
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June 17th, 2008 at 9:12 am
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June 17th, 2008 at 9:33 am
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June 19th, 2008 at 7:52 am
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June 23rd, 2008 at 12:06 pm
[...] Stuart Herbert On PHP - 40 Firefox Extensions Every Web Developer Should Check Out. This is a great list of tools, I use many of them on a daily basis. [...]
July 6th, 2008 at 11:53 am
[...] 50 extensions Firefox pour le développeur Web. [...]
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July 31st, 2008 at 3:22 pm
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