As most of my readers will know by now I love firefox and its enormous range of addons. I have to restrict myself from adding more as they undoubtedly can slow it down, but they are sooooo useful! There are too many to include in a single post so I’m starting a weekly look at the ones I have found most useful. There are many more out there that I haven’t even looked at yet! As I’m a web designer I’ll start with addons I use in this respect.
Web Developer
My no1 Firefox addon for web development. With Web Developer you can outline Divs, see block sizes, find element information, resize browser windows and much more. Absolutely essential for theme or style design!
Fire FTP
Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more! 
Screen Grab
Screengrab saves entire webpages as images. It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.
Great for making screenshots of your new theme of style!
Are you a web developer? Do you have a favorite Firefox addon to share with us? Please leave a comment!
My two all time favorites are Firebug and Search Status.
Firebug shows you the code of a page in an interactive way (mouse over an element and the element’s dimensions become blue, easy for figuring out why that one wayward div does not do what it’s supposed to do) and when you click on an element you get the associated CSS styles. It’s a near perfect plugin for problem solution.
Search status is great for SEO purposes. You can easily go to SE reporting tools from the plugin and it helps with keyword analysis and such. Especially when combined with SEO For Firefox this one is very useful.
I use Web Developer as well, but didn’t know about the others yet. Especially screen grab looks useful.
Hi Joost,
Nice to hear from a Caribbean neighbour.I also use SEO for firefox. I can’t remember why i didn’t like firebug too much, maybe I should try it again!
Firebug can seem pretty complicated at first. It took me quite a while to introduce it to the designers because of this. But now they love it as much as I do (and they can figure out their code problems themselves more easily).
Hi Janet, nice post! I didn’t know Screen Grab existed, but I’m definitely going to try it out. When developing I use Web Developer, Header Spy and Live HTTP Headers to check for cookies. It saves me a lot of time
Thanks Bart. I didn’t know about Header Spy and Live HTTP headers. I’ll be checking them out!
Hi Janet - Thanks for the FireFox extension tips, and the great site. I love Web Developer too, and have found that along with the “Rendered Source Chart” extension it is a good way to uncover the hidden structure of pages/websites. See an overview post on that at:
http://webhelpermagazine.com/2007/11/firefox-analyze-website-structure/
Must be tough, living in Antiqua
Regards -
Scott
Hey Scott
I had a look at your site. Some interesting and helpful stuff there! Thanks for sharing it with us.
Yeah it’s real tough living here. All that sunshine can be hard to cope with!
Wish that I shared the opinion of FireFTP. It’s the only FTP extension I’ve found for Firefox which claims to do secure FTP, but every configuration option I’ve tried has resulted in no connection between me and my site.
My host requires SFTP on port 22, and FireFTP just doesn’t seem to be able to do it.
I use Shazou. Anyone try this before? It can show me the basic information of that website owner, such as the location of server and the IP address. Most important is i can know the website locate at which country.
HI,
I will add ColorZilla to it.
These three are the nice addons. But I will add SEO to it. That is a must for any serious web developer, who wants to get the results.
Good Collection Thx!
Here is my list of Top Firefox Add-Ons for SEO purposes.
Nice list SEOcontest! I’ll be checking some of them out.
I’d like to see a Screen Grab that mimizes the bytes of the file. Are not these files too big to work with? I’m talking computer speen on opening one up.
Addon: colliris previews.
It is very useful for viewing the links in a popup window. I will suggest to try this, as it saves lot of time by opening the new link/page in a popup window.
I loves Mozilla FireFox, and I loves addons, too. It helped me a lot in daily life. Have anyone tried InFormEnter yet ? It ’s such a good addon ! It is even better than RoboForm. You should try it !
I am waiting for upgrade or answers for closing tabs in firefox
My favorite is SEOquake. I use it all the time.
Great List is updating!!
This indeed is an excellent and very helpful list of Mozilla Firefox Addon recommendations. Also, there was a reply in regards to waiting for answers for closing tabs in Firefox. While I’m not sure exactly what is being asked here, but the keyboard shortcut is Control+W. If you want to undo a close tab in Firefox, the keyboard shortcut is Control+Shift+T. Hope this helps.
For sure Firefox webmaster toolbar is my favourite, have you tried for spiderzilla??
Does anyone know where I can get the Meta Tag plugin? It is like a sidebar plugin in Firefox that shows the meta tags of a page. I tried searching Mozilla (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=meta+tags&cat=all) and as you can see on that page, it just gets flooded and flooded with plugins but they are not what I am looking for. I am looking for the one that get’s triggered by Alt-M. I have it installed in my office but not at home.
And if I try to visit the developer page from the plugin itself, it just goes to some domain parking page.
These addons are very nice and useful. I like very much the Screen Grab who reduced very much my daily copy - paste procedure.
Great list of addons, thank you very much.
Can you please update some of the older weekly round up’s? There are gems in here!
Nice list. However, i already have a number of social bookmarking plugins installed and the firefox application seem to be taking more time to load up.
Screen grab seems to be a nice tool. However does it allows to crop the images?
the greatest addon for firefox is Fire FTP its really fast in uploading and downloading to and from my site also it wont take a space on desktop lol just open firefox and then u could open ur site ftp also
thnx for sharing
I appreciate your work firefox…. It helps me lot. Thanks for posting