The greatest FireFox extension is without doubt Firebug which has made a web designers work incalculably easier - Where there used to be lots and lots of guesswork and trial and error there now is FireBug. For a web designer life has been made a darned sight simpler!

My one criticism would be that I would really like an option for Firebug to be positioned at one side rather than at the bottom because with the widespread use of widescreen monitors generally means there is much more room at the sides rather than the bottom (There is an extension called “Widerbug” which does do this but it is a port and generally is a couple of versions behind Firebug which I am not too sure about as I like to keep my system at the “cutting edge”!)

You probably are well aware of Firebug as most people seem to be, but to ‘pimp’ it out there are a couple of extensions which give it added usefulness:

FireRainbow - This allows for syntax highlighting of the CSS, HTML, Javascript code - Meaning instead of just boring old black text there is now nice pretty colours giving the code further order.

FireQuery - I do not profess to be a Javascript expert but am slowly assembling a working knowledge of JQuery and this addon makes seeing what is going on with the JQuery much breezier!

YSlow - This is good for letting you know why your website is slow to load and what you can do speed it up. It analyses web pages and suggest ways to improve it based on a set of rules.

It can grade a webpage against best practice criteria and mark the pages from A to F which can certainly give you pointers on what things you do to speed it up.

It also has a component section which will tell you the size of each file being called into the page.

The tools section is v handy too - It can show you the attached Javascript files in 3 states -

• As they are called to the page
• Beautified (i.e Coherent)
• Minified (One long long line of incomprehensibility!)

The tools section also has All Smush.it which is extremely quick and handy if you are trying to shave off extra k because it will automatically examine your images and shave off unneeded weight... You can then download the slimmed images and upload them to your server for a quick and instant weight save with no noticeable difference to the image quality.


Colorzilla - This when installed is located at the bottom left of the browser and allows you to find out what colour an is being used by mousing over it

MeasureIt - This is good as you may guess for measuring whatever you would like to know the dimension of within a webpage

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