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Firefox Extensions I Use

Whenever somebody sits down at my laptop and uses it’s default browser, they’re generally curious as to what exactly is going on. It’s pretty cluttered (in an organized mess kinda way), and there’s all these crazy icon sets and toolbars everywhere. I’ve decided some clarification was in order, so here goes:

• Joe Hewitt’s Firebug – The premier tool for anybody interested in advanced web development & design. When I found this one my job became 147% easier. Quickly jump right inside the DOM and see what’s going on. Edit stylesheets, live. View the network statistics of each page you request. Oh, did I mention it debugs JavaScript? The list goes on…
• Yahoo’s YSlow – Can’t figure out why a page is taking forever to load? Convinced it isn’t SQL related? Enlist this helper to explain where the bottlenecks could be. (Requires Firebug)
• Chris Pederick’s Web Developer – I had this one before Firebug, and I was impressed by it at the time. There’s two wonderful features I find handy in it these days: “Automatically Populate Form Fields” and “Disable JavaScript”.
• Aaron Boodman’s Greasemonkey – Write custom JavaScript to be executed each time you hit a specified page. For instance, sick of filling in the username and password box on a site that won’t ‘remember’ you? Let Greasemonkey do it for you!
• Alex Sirota’s ColorZilla – This glorious tool adds a tiny eyedropper (much like Photoshop’s) to the bottom left of your Firefox window. A great alternative to print-screen, open Photoshop, paste, select eyedropper tool, etc.
• Kevin Freitas’ MeasureIt – A quick ruling tool which lets you draw boxes and see the width and height of any element, right in your browser.
  
• Devon Jensen’s Download Statusbar – Firefox’s built-in file downloader is bulky and old-school. This pretty gem downloads files in a minimalist fashion at the bottom of your browser and gives you more functionality over how to handle downloads.
  
• Zeniko’s Fission – A simple add-on which displays an animated loading progress bar to the URL (location) bar at the top. You even have a choice of colors. (woo!)
  
• Séparé – Purely cosmetic, truly organizational. Create lil’ orange tabs which separate one group of tabs from the next. (Warning: I have a feeling there may be some strange memory leak in this add-on, use at your own risk!)

And remember, if you find tons of use from any of these extensions then I urge you to donate! Most of them are developed by individuals who could probably use the help.

Think I’m missing one or two that you can’t live without? Let me know!