atom thoughts

There are a ton of great plugins for Firefox that make Web development a whole lot better. I really don’t know how I managed without them.

My most recent addition is called FireBug, which provides a number of great features including:

• Javascript and CSS error notification.
• Inspection tools for HTML, the DOM, CSS and events.
• A Javascript command line.
• XmlHttpRequest spying (which is great for AJAX debugging).

Some of my other favorite Firefox web development extensions include:

• Web Developer – This should be in every web developer’s tool box. It provides a ton of different utilities for doing things such as disabling cookies and javascript, informational tools such as highlighting elements within your page, tools for validating your HTML and CSS, and way too much more to list.

• DevBoi – A one stop shop for all of your reference documentation needs. It includes the docs for HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript and also has add on packs for Ruby On Rails, PHP and XUL. Be sure to install the offline version if you want to be able to access these without internet access.

• IETab – This is a great tool for viewing your page in IE from within Firefox. It will open the page in a new tab that is rendered using the IE engine. Pretty slick.

If you have any that you think I missed, I would love to hear about them.