Posted on May 23rd, 2010Firefox is the best web browser – millions of people will agree with this statement. Even though in the last few months it has lost some of its previous performance, it still has its exceptional stability, and more importantly, database of add-ons and themes.
That collection of more than ten thousands useful applications (that are also free!) is what makes it the number one browser on the planet. Even though Chrome is faster and looks better (at least I think it looks sleeker than Firefox), a lot of people will never switch to it because there are some add-ons installed in their Firefox that they can’t live without.
SEO professionals, web masters, developers and designers have access to a lot of very helpful tools for Firefox that makes their life and work easier. Take for example, the award winning Web Developer Toolbar, the Adblock plugin or the exceptionally useful against various threats NoScript add-on (which, by the way, Chrome can never run because of its internal design and coding).
Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 promise to deliver even more speed and a completely revamped, modern interface, which will most likely make all of the other browsers play catch up forever (anyone remember Opera?).
Anyway, in this article you’ll find a collection of the best Firefox add-ons for web analytics, which should be useful for both SEO professionals and developers and simple web masters who own a site and want to know how to improve it and find out everything they can about their visitors.
WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger). This is an amazing tool for any web developer and online marketer. What it does is analyze, collect and show you detailed information about the data that is collected through Cookies, Query strings and other solutions and sent to the various services and companies that implemented them. You can use it to see how the web analytics or advertising platform code is implemented on any site and find out what exactly do the sites you visit know about you (and you’d be surprised about how much they know! Did you know that a lot of sites can see what other sites you visited?). There are 2 versions: the Lite one is good for web masters and people who need to test one or a couple of sites, while the Pro version is for professionals that need to audit tens and hundreds of pages and export detailed information and reports to CSV or XML files for later (re)viewing.
Wappalyzer. This is a simple, yet pretty useful Firefox add-on that shows you the technologies and software used on any website. It’s pretty informative, and you’ll probably be surprised to see what CMSes and scripts some major (and minor) sites use. It can detect a lot of software solutions and CMS, from the Russian 1C-Bitrix to Crazy Egg (a heat map analytics application), Drupal, MediaWiki and Vox.
Alexa Sparky. Alexa is still a pretty good way to find out the traffic levels, number of links, demographics and popularity of a web site and Sparky is their official add-on for Firefox. It can display the traffic information and trends data of a website in the bottom toolbar of Firefox. It can also be used to compare the current site’s information to any other site online and can also provide alternative pages for when you encounter various errors (like the most frequent “404 Page Not Found”).
Google Analytics Watcher. This is another simple, but useful add-on that displays your Google Analytics most important reports in the bottom toolbar of Firefox, all the time, with the latest information. If you don’t like the Google Analytics page or it loads slowly for you and you hate accessing it every time you want to see how many visitors have been to your site in the last few hours, you can easily use Google Analytics Watcher for this purpose. You can choose which data to display (the default is only Unique Visitors, Visits and Page Views) and will always have the information before your eyes (well, at least as long as Firefox is open 
.
SERPAnalytics Google Search. This is a great tool for SEO professionals and people who want to know information about various keywords their site is targeting or find out the SERP position of their web site. The add-on uses an external tool, SERPAnalytics.com in conjunction with Google Search to display a wealth of useful information, from Pagerank and location of a datacenter to Cost per Click data and number of searches for various keywords. Be careful not to use it too often, or use it via proxies, as Google doesn’t like it when too many queries come from the same PC and can temporarily ban it.
There are many more great add-ons for Firefox (as I said, there are over ten thousand!), just perform a search on Google or Bing for the ones you need. I found the Babelfish translator by searching for “instant translation add-on for Firefox”, and it’s a really amazing add-on that translates any text you select instantly in a nice small tooltip under the mouse cursor. If you have something you need to do online, you should definitely try and find a Firefox add-on that will help you or even do it for you.