Essential FireFox add-ons for web-developers

Although Chrome seems to be winning the browser wars these days, I still like to develop against Firefox first and then tweak/hack CSS for compatibility with other browsers afterwards. I do this because I believe that Firefox most closely adheres to the HTML and CSS standards when it renders sites. I’m pretty sure that this belief used to be true, but I’m not certain if it’s technically correct today. However, as an approach it still seems to work pretty well. I’d be interested to hear your views on this.

I thus know more about Firefox add-ons than add-ons for other browsers. Here is my list of essential Firefox add-ons, which I’ll keep up-to-date:

Firebug

Totally essential for web-developers. Does pretty much everything you’ll ever need, from on-the-fly HTML and CSS tweaks, to JavaScript debugging, to monitoring network calls and cookies, and much, much more.

Web Developer by Chris Pederick

If you do find something that Firebug doesn’t do, there’s a fair chance that Chris Pederick has thought of it and included it in his web-developer toolbar. Worth getting alone because it makes it ridiculously easy to enable/disable JavaScript and CSS without having to remember where the options are hiding in the standard Firefox options. It does some other neat things too though, like highlighting elements of certain kind and showing outlines, which are invaluable if you want to get everything to line up nicely.

iMacros

Not really a developer tool, but a great tool for recording and replaying macros in Firefox. I tend to use it to log in to sites that have laborious access procedures or have auto-complete disabled.

User Agent Switcher

Another one from Chris Pederick, and very useful for testing out different user agents with your code. When used in conjunction with the re-size feature in the Web Developer toolbar mentioned above, you can get your sites in a pretty good state to work on mobile devices, before testing on the devices themselves.

SAML Tracer

Useful when working with SAML based single-sign on solutions, which I’ve been doing lately with ADFS.

That’s all for now folks!