Firefox as a Development Tool

Ajax and JavaScript programming is made more difficult by the silence of the browser which does not signal anything about the actions, contents of exchanges and reasons of errors. However some Firefox extensions can do it and thus turn the browser into the interface of development that Ajax misses.

Extensions for programmers

Firebug

Allows to edit and debug HTML, CSS and Javascript code. Particularly useful for Ajax by displaying details of results of each interaction with the server. A window opens in bottom of the Web page for debugging, where the nature of the JavaScript errors and the line where they occur are indicated.

Web Developer

This extension adds a menu to Firefox. The new commands make it possible to display CSS code and to edit it. It is possible to disable the style of a page to have an outline of it, such as search engines see it.

Page Speed

From Google and working with Firebug, it analyzes the performance of a Web page. The extension adds the Page Speed tab in the panel of Firebug.

Extensions for webmasters

Their usage is larger, but can supplement nevertheless the list of tools for webmasters.

• HTML Validator.
  Add to Firefox the validator of the W3C.
• SEO Quake.
  Displays several indicators on the popularity of a visited website.
• Answers.
  Connected to the AnswersTips site, when a word is clicked and also the shift or control key pressed, a definition is displayed.
• Screengrab.
  Create a thumbshot of the current Web page. To do this you click on a button in the lower right corner, and you choose to save it into a file or copy it to the clipboard. It may then be pasted into a drawing software as Photofiltre and resized with Thumbnail Maker.

How to make a Firefox extension?

Some tutorials and tools...

• Developer. More information about extensions.
• Extension Dev. An extension to make extensions.

The complete list

• Addons.

See also

• Extensions useful to Net surfers.
• Winners of the extension contest for 2008.

A precaution when these extensions were installed and that they are often used, check their compatibility before installing a new version of Firefox which could make them inoperative.