20+ Firefox Add-ons for Designers and Webmasters

admin on Mar 23rd 2010 with 11 comments

If you compare various browsers, you will find that Firefox is the most widely used browser and offers amazing functionality. That is why designers and developers simply love it. Moreover, it has the ability to provide a huge list of add-ons making the user experience much better. Firefox offers amazing add ons which are of a great help to the designers and developers.
Although, there are many useful Firefox adds for Designers, But BestPSDtoHTML has listed 22 Firefox add ons that every designer must know. There is a brief description at the end of each, so that you can decide upon and download the add-on of your own choice.

Important Firefox Add-ons

Web Developers

It is the most useful add-on for the designers. Web developer Extension adds a menu and toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is used to identify that what CSS styles are present in the page elements. After installing this extension, there would be ‘web developer’ menu in the tools.

Alexa Sparky 1.4.7

Sparky is useful for quickly checking how popular a site is without adding an extra row of buttons to your browser. Alexa ranks websites, and one of ways we know which sites are popular is the highly anonymous toolbar data. There’s no need to be a super influential blogger, have a million followers on twitter, or spend hours digging things to have your voice heard. All you need to do is surf the web with an Alexa Toolbar installed. As you visit websites with an Alexa Toolbar installed, you are also contributing to the related links you see in your toolbar and similarly, when you look at related links you are looking at what people similar to yourself find interesting.

Event spy

DOM Event Spy adds a context menu item to nodes in DOM Inspector’s tree view that allows you to watch events that pass by the selected node. Event Spy is a Firefox extension that lets you watch JavaScript events as they occur.

Im Translator

ImTranslator is one of the most popular and highly demanded add-on for Firefox received the highest rating from numerous users. With more than 82,000 weekly downloads, ImTranslator has been downloaded over 3,200,000 times. Online Translator performs real-time translation for huge number of languages. TTS Voice presented by animated speaking characters will read the text in the most realistic, human-sounding way in a variety of languages.Spell Checker delivers full-featured high-quality spell-checking tool for accurate input of information. Virtual Keyboard supports multilingual text input.

CS Lite

This extension will allow you to easily control cookie permissions. It can be accessed from the statusbar, a toolbar button, or the context menu. It contains less features, but is considerably easier to use. Just click on the icon to allow, block, or temporarily allow the site to set cookies. You can also view, clear or edit the cookies very easily.

YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and why they’re slow based on Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis.

Grease Monkeys

This is again an amazing Firefox add-on which allows you to run your own javascript on any page that you are viewing. Basically , it allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.

Live HTTPHeaders

It allows you to view HTTP headers of a page and while browsing. It also helps in debugging the web application. You can inspect the remote site that which kind of web server it is using and the cookies sent by it.

Opera View

It can open pages in Opera from Firefox context menus. It is again very useful for web developers. No doubt, you must be using Firefox all the time, but sometimes, it happens that you need to view the page in Opera browser. But this has made the process very easies by having an option of ‘View this page in Opera’ in the page context menu, the item Open Link Target in Opera to the link context menu and a button to the toolbar.

XMarks

If you have the habit of bookmarking your favorite topics, then X marks is for you. Install it on all your computers to keep your bookmarks and (optionally) passwords backed up and synchronized. Xmarks also helps you to find that content which is highly appreciated by the millions of users and who have bookmarked it. It is synchronised with all the major browsers like IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera etc. Xmarks offers amazing bookmark synchronization between your computers and browsers via its synchronization server.

Codetech

With this excellent extension, now you can edit your documents just next to the web pages that you surf. The interface is modeled after Dreamweaver.

Firebug

This extension in combination with Firefox, gives a collection of development tools in your hands while browsing. With this powerful add-on, you can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Fireshot

It is a brilliant add on which allows to take screenshots of any web page. Not only this, it also offers you a set of editing and annotation tools, so that you can capture web elements in almost no time and can add graphical as well as text annotations in that. It is an extremely useful tool for designers, testers and content reviewers. The captures can be thereby printed, emailed or copied to clipboard.

IEtab

This is an extension from Taiwan. ITt allows the embedding of Internet Explorer in to the Firefox tabs. again , there is no doubt that you must be using Firefox all the time but with this feature, you can see can see web page in Internet Explorer and then frequently switch back to Firefox. It permits you to test and compare how each browser renders your web pages without having to leave Firefox or install IE.

Image Zoom

It allows you to add the zooming effect and rotation functionality to the images. Now you have the complete control over the size of the images. You can zoom the individual image and also the pages of the images can be zoomed out.

Palette Grabber

This is marvelous tool for web designers. As, it allows to create a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X based on the current page.

W3C Offline Page Validator

It is again a good tool for developers. Coding requires to W3C standards compliant. It allows to Submit the current open page to the W3C validation tool, even if the page is on a non-public server, a local file, requires login, etc. It works both offline and online.

Color Zilla

It allows the designers to make the best use of Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. In addition to color picker, ColorZilla offers a DOM color analyzer which allows to identify all the elements coreesponding to particular color and the CSS styles associated with them. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The present palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most frequent used colors in custom palettes.

Dummy Lipsum

This allows to generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text.

SeoQuake

Seoquake is a Firefox SEO extension. It is an extremely useful tool for web masters specially who deal with search engine optimization(SEO) and internet promotion of web sites. It identifies important parameters related to the search engine optimization. It is also a good tool for those who are fresh in the field of SEO to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. SeoBar is a facilitating toolbar, which shows the values of selected parameters for the page currently opened in the browser window. The set of parameters selected are as per the choice of webmasters.

Page Diff

It is a page comparison tool. With this, designers and developers can compare the HTML codes of the two pages. Original page source is not taken but the browser generated DOM compliant view source is taken up.

Clip Marks

This is also a very helpful tool. it allows you to clip and then share selected parts of articles, blog or whatever you read on the web. Now with the introduction of newly integrated amplify service, you can directly share the clips on twitter and facebook. You can save your clips on clipmarks.com. Your clips can be saved for others to learn from or be entertained by, but there is an option to make them private too.