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I know that there are many articles that mention the “best 10″ and “The 10 add-ons you can’t miss.” This is a list made by me, in whom I mention, what I understand to be the best add-ons for web designers. I use them all the time; hence I thought to share my views with you. Firefox, as I mentioned in the previous article, has a huge gallery of additives known as “add-ons”. These range from changing the look of your browser to uploading files via FTP to a server.

In this article I will mention the add-on and give a small explanation of what’s it for. I will write an article explaining in depth, how to use the add-on, later on.

TOP 10 add-ons

1. The Firebug extension for Mozilla Firefox allows the debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website’s CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript, and provides other Web development tools. It also has a JavaScript console for logging errors and watching values, as well as a “Net” feature which monitors the amount of time in milliseconds it takes to load and execute scripts and images on the page. Firebug’s official website has a complete guide to what it can do.




2. Web Developer is an extension for Mozilla-based web browsers which adds editing and debugging tools for web developers. It has been tested to be compatible with Firefox, Flock, and Seamonkey. You can disable the css, images, cookies and more. View the images dimension’s and other information that is hidden.

   Web Developer was a grand prize winner in Mozilla’s 2006 “Extend Firefox” competition and it is one of the few extensions specifically recommended by the Firefox developers.




3. Google toolbar resides above the browser’s tab bar and provides a search box to carry out web searches. Users can login into their GMail accounts and access their emails, saved bookmarks and web history. It has tools such as AutoLink, AutoFill, translation, spell checker common to all browsers, while pop-up blocker and word finder are restricted to Internet. It can also tell you the Google Page Rank of any page you visit.




4. SEOpen provides quick access to some web-based tools to help with search engine optimization. Quickly check inbound links, PageRank, http headers, and lots more.




5. XRefresh is a nifty little add-on. Web designers and developers will take advantage of this tool’s usefulness. Xrefresh will automatically refresh a web page once it notices that there has been a change, be it in its html or css. No more F5.




6. Ever see a web page you love and wonder what color palette they’re using? With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting information about DOM elements quickly and easily.




7. FireFTP is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox in the form of an add-on. It supports FTP, FTPS, and SFTP. FireFTP is charityware and runs on platforms that Firefox supports. Upload your files directly from you browser. No more switching from ftp program to browser to view your web page.




8. Coral IETab is a Firefox extension which enables you to use the embedded IE engine within tabs of Mozilla Firefox. It is not only a great tool for web developers, like IE Tab, but also a useful tool for normal users, since you can easily switch to IE in TAB VIEW when you meet incorrectly rendered web pages in Firefox. Of course, the web page “should” render the same in all browsers, but we all know IE is a bit of a bother.




9. Abduction! Adds a right click option to take screenshots of an entire web page or just part of a web page to save as an image. Great way to keep a scrapbook of web pages for design and layout reference.




10. DND Domain Details. Displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports. Shows links to check server status and cache when page fails to load.

These add-ons are very useful for any web designer or developer. Use them and find out for yourself.

Written by: Juan Rivera