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Firefox add-ons for web designers

 

My brother, who started in computing at the very beginning and spent his working life programming, was helping me network my computer. I noticed that he used IE a lot and I asked if he ever used Firefox. No he said. I was surprised, because apart from Firefox being more secure for the web surfer, it is free and is very useful for the web designer.

The is now the most significant product of the Mozilla open source project, and is extremely useful for web designers. If it is not yours, you should consider trying it out. Why? Well that's what this article is about. I won't go into the history of Mozilla and Firefox and how it has been developed by an open source community. I'm just going to tell you about the add-ons which are the useful ones for the web designer. Here are some of the most popular Firefox add-ons.

*1 Web Developer by Chris Pederick. It adds a toolbar to the browser that is loaded with features to help you develop for the web! Things like outlining various html elements on the fly, enabling and disabling styles, resizing the browser window to various standards, validating your pages, it has a built in ruler tool, options for images, forms, cookies - you name it!

*2 ColorZilla by Alex Sirota. Super little tool that sits tucked in a little corner and when you click on it you can sample any color on the web page and copy it to your clipboard. Did I use the right blue on those links?

*3 MeasureIt by Kevin Freitas. This thing makes my life so much easier. It allows you to draw a box on the page and measure its dimensions. This tool is invaluable for making sure things are aligned properly.

 

*4 Firebug by Joe Hewitt. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML and Javascript live on any webpage!

*5 IE View by Paul Roub. This inconspicuous little add-on lets you load pages in IE! Perfect for cross browser testing!

*6 HTML Validator by Marc Gueury. This one puts a green checkmark at the bottom of your browser if the document validates. If it doesn't, it shows warnings and errors with a click so that you can hurry off and fix them.

*7 SeoQuake by The SeoQuake Team. This extension gives you a ton of information on your page including Google page ranking, Alexa ranking, showing keyword density and META tags, it allows you to see backlinks and so much more! Quite a handy little thing.

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© Jenny Campbell