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Just a quick post as I get back into things after the holidays. While I’ve had a chance to use most browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc) I tend to use FireFox day to day, so it’s no surprise that I do most of my testing and development on it. One of the nice things about modern browsers is that they allow you to use add-ons, and there are a number of them that are useful for web development. Here are a couple that I use.
Firebug
Firebug is a good, all purpose add-on that lets you view and debug HTML, Javascript and CSS on live webpages. I mostly use it for debugging Javascript, and it works well for that. There’s an extension for this called FirePHP that lets you use the FireBug consol to debug PHP code, but I haven’t really used it much.
Webdeveloper
Mostly I use this for looking at CSS on a page, but it’s also useful for letting you view the structure of a page, viewing form information, outlining and highlighting elements like tables, links, etc on a page.
YSlow
This is a handy little plugin from Yahoo; it monitors a page while it loads and gives a break down of how long it takes to render/load each section (javascript files, images, etc). Pretty good for finetuning a page if it’s particularly slow.
HTML Validator
HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.
