Posted on February 1st, 2011
Mozilla Firefox is the smart choice of most web developers and web designers currently because of its options of Ad-ons that can be downloaded for free and conveniently integrated so that they can be used straight from the browser.
Some add-ons are a must-keep in your browser and every web developer should have them. Other add-ons are necessary for web masters so they can have more control and optimization of their web pages. Still some add-ons are there that manage to bring the “icing on the cake” and you tend to love their specialty. Let’s discuss the very basic or “essential” add-ons below:
1. Grease Monkey
A web developer treats grease monkey as his most prized possession. GreaseMonkey is actually an alternate engine for page presentation for Firefox users so they can customize the webpage loading process by freely editing and adding JavaScript widgets that they like. A large number of free snippets are available on UserScripts that incorporate GreaseMonkey and make your browsing experience better.
2. Web Developer
This add-on monitors page rendering with options on tool panel. Web developer gives you control of different components of a webpage like CSS modules, “forms” of the page, minimization of page loading by image optimization and several other features.
3. Firebug
If you want to monitor the page elements in a live browser then firebug is your add-on. Not only do you administer page rendering time, CSS elements performance and JavaScript load time, but you get a proper timeline which represents the utilization of each element at a particular time while page loading. Some of the web developments Add-Ons have firebug Engine in their backend so you may be compelled to make use of it in any case.
4. YSlow
To closely watch the performance of your webpage on Firefox and other browsers Yslow is the choice. It will analyze every page element, from the basic HTML tags to CSS style sheets, to pictures and you will see a comparative performance and rating of the webpage with a pre-determined set of rules. You can even give your own rule set to judge performance. You will be given suggestions to improve page performance on the browser of your choice. Yslow runs on Windows, Mac, OS X and Linux and has back end Firefox engine.
5. CSS Viewer
If web developers can analyze each CSS element properly, they can aid them greatly. This is particularly helpful when web pages are designed and you are inspired from a particular outlook or when a particular page is to be copied exactly. With the help of CSS viewer, you just need to hover over a page element to inspect it. It can be turned off when you are simply browsing.
6. FasterFox
If you want to try out advanced Firefox settings without running your present settings and browser configurations then you should use Fasterfox which lest you manage this in a convenient manner. You can play around with your network setting and use its intelligent “pre-fetching” feature to cache all page links.