5 Essential Web Development Addons for Firefox

Posted Sunday 12th July 2009

Firefox excels when it comes to addons and there is over 121 million on the official website. Shifting through them I’ve come up with 5 essential addons for web development that are available cross-platform, some you’ve probably heard of but nevertheless important to put down.

1. Web Developer

The aptly named “Web Developer” addon has an exhaustive list of features for extensive design and form testing. You can use it’s features via a toolbar or the right click and it’s very useful for disabling quickly images, stylesheets, javascript as well as testing forms, outlining elements and quickly validating pages and stylesheets.

Web Developer Addon for Firefox

- Get the Web Developer addon from mozilla.org

2. FireFTP

FireFTP is a popular FTP client that can be used within Firefox. Fully featured it’s a client in its own right and is extremely handy being light, fast and easy to use. With it’s easy interface and array of options it’s definitely an essential tool especially on the go.

FireFTP Addon for Firefox

- Get FireFTP addon from mozilla.org

3. Firebug

Firebug is a great addon that allows you to debug and edit HTML and CSS live on-the-fly. View the DOM’s hierarchy of a page, run Javascript on the fly, debug scripts, edit elements, view headers and retrieve the amount of time it’s taking for scripts to execute. A brilliant addon for the more advanced developer.

Firebug addon for Firefox

- Get Firebug addon from mozilla.org

4. SEO for Firefox

Provided and developed by seobook.com you will need to register an account to get SEO for Firefox. A great tool for getting SEO information such as Google Pagerank, Yahoo page links and embedded Google Cache Dates, traffic values, site age and a nofollow highlighter this is an essential tool for SEO statistical information.

SEO for Firefox addon

- Get SEO for Firefox addon from seobook.com

5. IE NetRenderer

IE NetRenderer allows you to render a page you’re viewing in IE 5.5, 6, 7 and 8. It redirects you to a page that does the work for you allowing it to be cross-platform. Probably more useful on Windows (funnily enough) with the likes of IEs4Linux but still a brilliant tool for testing those annoying quirks in Internet Explorer.