Over the past few years the Firefox community has growth fast and fierce.  For web developers there have been countless add-on’s and plugins published that making building websites (i) more efficient (ii) more browser-compatible, and (iii) easier to debug.  Below are my top five:

Top 5 Web Developer Firefox Add-on’s

• Web Developer – Integrates with Firefox to create a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools (e.g. outlining page elements, re-sizing browser window size, site-specific cookie management, and validation tools )
• 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
• YSlow – YSlow brings additional functionality to Firebug regarding site performance. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages which coincides with the YSlow team as well as metrics defined in the book High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
• Server Spy – Indicates the web server type for the sites you visit (e.g. Apache, IIS, Tomcat, nginx, and so forth) this data is invaluable during debugging complex server-side issues.
• Live HTTP Headers – Similar to Server Spy which just pulls the ‘Server’ element from the HTTP response header, this add-on makes additional elements available for debugging. See ‘List of HTTP headers‘ on the Wikipedia for a full listing of request/response definitions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Development, HTML Development, Quality Assurance, Security, Troubleshooting, Web Servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.