Top Ten Mozilla Add-Ons for Web Designers & Developers

There are plenty of Firefox add-ons available that can extend the browser’s core functionality.  For web designers, Firefox browser is the first choice owing to plenty of add-ons that can make the professional work of web design significantly more efficient and fruitful. Here are top ten highly recommended, Firefox add-ons for web designers. Hopefully these add-ons make your work less hectic by not having to jump around to different programs as much. You are welcome to share other Firefox add-ons you use, in the comments.

1. Firebug

If you were to ask any web designer or web developer what Firefox add-on they can’t live without, chances are he’ll say Firebug. It is very popular for front-end web development. It enables you to have development tools at fingertips. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…

It is an open source add-on that gives web designers powerful tools for inspecting and debugging a web design. It inspects the Document Object Model (DOM) to learn about the structure of the web page, determines attributes such as color, width, height of HTML elements and much more.  Download The Add-on

2. CSS Usage

CSS Usage is an extension for Firebug (thus necessary to have Firebug installed) that allows you to know unused CSS style rules. It identifies the CSS you use and don’t use. It enables you to point out what unnecessary parts can be removed. You should definitely use this add-on to keep your CSS files as lightweight as possible.  Download The Add-on

3. Inform Enter

If you find redundancy to enter your frequently used information such as name, mail, address… Inform Enter is the remedy for these irritations. It adds a small, clickable icon next to every input field in a web form, from where you can select the item to be inserted – no typing required.

Download The Add-on

4. Seo Quake

The web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox and for Internet Explorer, Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly. Seo Quake for Mozilla Firefox consists of three functional parts: SeoToolbar (requested parameters are shown in a separate toolbar in the browser), Seobar (requested parameters are shown in a separate, fully customizable with CSS, HTML block) and output of requested parameters on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). ATTENTION! Frequent use of big amount of parameters may lead to the ban from SE. In this case, you will need to delete cookies and change proxy server. It is also Mohammad's favorite Add-on. Download The Add-on

5. Screengrab

Screengrab saves entire WebPages as images… Taking screenshots in the browser is a common task for web designers. Screengrab is a simple tool for taking full-page or partial-page screenshots. You can copy the screenshot to your clipboard, or save it to your hard drive as an image file.   Download The Add-on

6. HTML Validator

HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP. This add-on is available on WINDOWS, LINUX, and MACOSX. The new version is only compatible with Firefox 4.0 because of internal changes in Firefox. All platforms supported in previous versions are not recompiled for FF4.0. The new version recognizes HTML5 format.

Download The Add-on

7. Page Diff

PageDiff is a simple page compare application. It helps web developers and designers to see HTML code (text) differences between web pages. This is helpful for finding code irregularities or differences that will enable you to debug rendering issues. It doesn't take original page source.

This application compares two set of HTML code (texts), line by line. This add-on will save you possibly hours of work when you try to find what is changed on a site that you are working on. For instance, the background is randomly re-sized and the text has spaced out and there is nothing in the editor that has changed. You popped up the new preview link and the old preview link and brought up the difference in the html and have the site back to normal within a few minutes.  Download The Add-on

8. Web Developer

The Web Developer is a straight forward add-on with massively useful functions that will help web designers to perform tasks more efficiently. It analyzes the complete structure of a web page. The Web Developer add-on adds a toolbar with various options for working with web pages. For example, it has an option to inspect CSS styles of page elements that will tell you what CSS attributes they have, and which styles affect them. You can see the changes in real time. You can load a user defined style sheet, or disable styles altogether. You can also view form input data along with field names and values and manipulate forms for testing. Other features include links to online code validations, browser window resizing, source viewer with syntax highlighting and more.  Download The Add-on

9.ColorZilla

Color is the most frequent thing used by a web designer. ColorZilla is an incredibly simple add-on, includes a color picker. If you ever want to know what colors are used on a web page, ColorZilla is the tool for the job. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. It enables you to zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. It is another of Mohammad's favorite Add-ons.   Download The Add-on

10. FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP/SFTP client for Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP/SFTP servers. Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more…  Download The Add-on

 

Umair let me take the opportunity of commenting first on one of your extremely valuable post. As a web designer my self, I had never looked into the importance of these tools as much as you made it looked so simple and useful. I often wasted a lot of time troubleshooting browser compatibility issues linked to codes in the templates but never realized that how easily these errors could be solved using these brilliant tools. I personally liked it a lot and your post forced me to give you a thumbs up! Great work.

  Umair Ahmed Khan

About the Guest Author:

Umair is an Undergraduate Student, pursuing his B.E Degree in Computer and Information System Engineering. He has a desire to develop IPhone and Android applications in future. You can contact him always at his Facebook

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Mohammad 5/29/2011