I've been building several sites and an eCommerce engine…

… in the past two weeks and had to do quite a lot of browser compatibility testing. I managed to get all the browsers to act the same way but the very experience of using Firefox was excruciating. I had so many things annoying me:

Lack of multiple rows of tabs
That God damn ICE AGE Download Window that pops up all the time
… and a bunch more.

Had to find some AddOns.

I did some research and found some addons which I highly recommend to you. It will make the Firefox experience a bit more pleasant. Anyway, it'll never compare to Opera, my love, with it's Speed Dial and hyperfast browsing. So here they are, most of the Firefox addons I use:

Firesizer - Resize browser Window to replicate another resolution. Invaluable for my 24" Display!
HttpFOX - HTTP Requests & Responses Viewer
Firecookie - Cookiemonger
Firebug - Everything you need to debug pages: DOM, JS, CSS, HTTP & +
MeasureIT - Superb for CSS positioning debugging
Download Statusbar - Kills that imbecil popup known as the Firefox Download Manager or something
User-Agent Switcher - Lame cloaking revealer
Screengrab - Fullpage screenshots
CSSViewer - Shows CSS styles on mouse over objects
Flagfox - Server location as a flag
QuickJava - Disable / Enable Javascript / Java easily
View Source With - … external application
Hackbar - Some URL cracking (slicing/dicing) tools
XPather - Get XPath of elements on page … Data Mining with XPath friendly parsers!
Snaplinks - Open several links at once with a selection rectangle
RefControl - Surf untraceable! Removes referer HTTP header from sites based on rules
JS/CSS View - View source with dedication to CSS/JS included files.
Javascript Blacklist - Death to Google Analytics! They ain't tracking my ass around the web.
View Dependencies - List external files loaded by the active page.
Extension Lister - Know your extensions to recommend to freidns easily.
Downthemall! - Multi-downloader and other cool features!
Morning Coffee - Bookmark manager or something :)
Smart Bookmarks Bar - Shrink bookmarks to icon-only so bar fits more!

And the addons recommended by YOU:

Web Developer - recommended by silent
S3Fox - recommended by Papa Rage
ElasticFox - recommended by Papa Rage
YSlow - recommended by Papa Rage
SEO For Firefox - recommended by Papa Rage

*** Bookmark this page and visit every now and then as I'll add here all the plugins that are worth using in developement.

These plugins will make your life a bit easier as a developer in a browser that has never been designed for speed and power users. I need to open and load 10+ pages in a matter of (few) seconds, Firefox will never to that. I can move at least 3x faster in Opera doing what I need to do and run over 100 open tabs at any given time. But people use Firefox so I must check how sites look in it too. I have an older post for web developers related to Visual WebPages' Debugging that's worth checking out.

If you got other valuable in terms of developement or interface / usability plugins lemme know and I'll check'em out.
PS: Opera still rules! Magic lives within speed.

7 Comments Posted By Readers :

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#1 silent from Indonesia web

Posted on Sunday, 18 May, 2008

you should add this to your list:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

#2 emonk from United States web