The Best Firefox Add-Ons

The Best Firefox Add-Ons

Firefox is an amazing web browser for a lot of reasons. It’s fast, usually reliable, and offers the ability for add-ons and plugins to integrate within the browser. There are thousands and thousands of different plugins that you can use, but not all of them will be worth your time. We personally use these plugins here at VRoooom Web, and we feel like these are the top 5 web development plugins you can use with Firefox.

1) Web Developer

Web Developer Toolbar Firefox Addon

Web developer is an add-on that adds various web developer tools to Firefox. The amazing tool gives you a ton of new options to use when developing a webpage. You can do a wide variety of things, such as disable your cache, disable images on a page, outline images, view information about every single element on the page, check for important tags such as meta tags and alt tags, and much more. It almost has too many features, many of which I never even have to use. It even has quick links to validate all your CSS and HTML. I’ve used this plugin countless times while developing new sites, and it definitely saves you tons of time.

2) ColorZilla

Colorzilla Firefox Addon

ColorZilla allows you to quickly get a color reading from any point in your browser window using an eyedropper. You can then copy and paste the hex code into any other program. It also has a color pallet so you can adjust this color. Zooming allows you to select the exact pixel you want the color of, and a newer feature allows you to measure the distance between any two points in the browser.

3) IE View

IE View Firefox Addon

This one might be just a personal favorite of mine, as I use it entirely too much it seems like. IE View adds Shortcuts to your right click menus that allow you to view whichever page you’re on in IE. Simply click the option, and IE will launch and automatically load whichever page you choose. You can also open link targets in a new IE window. It’s very helpful when you’re trying to get your CSS displaying universally across all browsers. We all know how annoying and tiresome IE can be when it comes to that.

4) Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate

Awesome Screenshot allows you to take screenshots of a webpage. You can either choose a certain portion of the page to take a screenshot of, or grab the entire page. After taking the screen shot, you can then annotate it to your liking with circles, arrows, rectangles, lines and text, blur sensitive info, and then upload to share with one click. Other screen capture plugins have been large and bulky for the task they accomplish, yet this one is small and lite. Doesn’t get in the way and works fast and efficiently when needed.

5) Firebug

Firebug is a nifty little tool that allows you to inspect any portion of code on a page, and modify it right then and there. You see the modifications you do live on a page, so you can test edits without having to upload the newest version every time you make a change. It also has a built in CSS editor so you can make live changes to CSS on a page as well. A network monitor shows you what parts of your page are taking the longest to load, breaking down load times file by file. It also has an extremely helpful error log for JavaScript, CSS, and XML. This is a very helpful add-on for anyone doing any web development at all.