Being a web developer, I find that extensions are immensely useful. Firefox is my browser of choice for regular browsing and testing websites, plus it is free and available for every operating system (otherwise I might use Safari more). One of the great things about Firefox, is the ability to add to it with extensions. They’re painless to install (and remove) and can make life so much easier.
Flashblock
I long ago learned to ignore the majority of advertisements on websites. They tend to have a pretty generic look, so it’s easy to filter them out. When sites have obtrusive advertisements (such as when they get in the way of you actually using the site, e.g., Fox News), I avoid visiting them in the future except to make fun of them. Unfortunately, someone decided that making Flash ads that go outside their “box” would be a great idea. The person must have thought, “We can make giant popup Flash ads that block as much of the screen as possible to render the site useless! Sure, 99 out of 100 people will learn to hate our company because of them, but that one in one-hundred will fall for it!
Flashblock takes care of this problem. It replaced flash movies with boxes of the same size that simply have the flash logo on them. If you hover over the logo, it changes into a play button. Just click it, and the flash movie starts up. For sites that you visit frequently and trust the flash content on, you can use the whitelist feature. Just add the domain and flash movies there will automatically load. You can also use wildcards (e.g., *.youtube.com) to make whitelisting much easier.
Forecast Fox
ForecastFox is a simple extension that shows current weather and weather for the next few days (adjustable in the options). Just set your zipcode and the weather is always just a glance away. You can also hover over the radar icon for a mini radar view or click on the extension to go directly to the AccuWeather website. There are dozens of options to meet the needs of almost everyone.
HTML Validator
Though using valid markup won’t guarantee that Internet Explorer will display a webpage properly, it will virtually do so for nearly every other browser out there. It’s always a good idea to validate any webpages you create or edit, but it can be a bit of a pain to do so. That’s where this extension comes in. It sits in the status bar letting you know how many errors and warnings the page you are on has. If you view the source, you can see more information and the errors/warnings will be highlighted. This extension makes it easy to verify the source of any webpage you create without going through any extra hassle.
Web Developer
Ever wish you could just click on a section of a webpage in order to know exactly what elements it is in, what styles are affecting it, and where those declarations are made? Ever want to quickly disable JavaScript or clear your cookies? Ever want to easily resize the browser window to see how a page looks at other resolutions? If you answered no, then I have to wonder why you are reading about a “Web Developer” extension. This one can do all that and a lot more. You can use the toolbar or the right-click menu to access the hundreds of features. This toolbar is nearly mandatory if you do any web development.
Firebug
JavaScript and I have a love-hate relationship. It can do such amazing things and it can also seem to not respond and give no real indications of what is going on. Of course, IE also does its own thing with JavaScript, which can lead to a lot of headaches. The Firebug extension can’t solve your IE problems, but it makes troubleshooting JavaScript so much easier. You can even see what AJAX requests were sent and what responses were received. You can execute any JavaScript command after a page has loaded. Firebug can actually do a lot more than that. You can edit live HTML and see exactly what part of the source is doing what on the page. Really, you should look at the Firebug site, because it has a million awesome features that I haven’t even started to explain (and I’m sure plenty that I haven’t taken advantage of).
I must say – I freaking love firebug. At my new job (I have to use windows), I’ve been writing a bunch of javascript. I open it up in IE – ‘you have an error on line 9348′ (I view source and there’s only 347 lines of code), I open it up in Firefox – ‘oh, sorry to see you forgot to put a semi-colon here, you’ll want to put it at this location (link to the line of code).