Firefox – Essential and Popular Add-ons for Designers

Firefox is the most proffered browser in cyber world. There are many reasons for preference but major one is Add-ons Support. These Add-ons enhance the functionality; give users lot more control on displayed contents and ability to grab the bits which are required.
As a web designer, your major focus should on the visual impact of web site or over all look and feels. CSS is responsible for such important issues. Some of Firefox Add-ons gives very easy option to change and view the effect of change quickly. You can analyze different web pages, how they are showing specific contents and using CSS effectively. Lot more of course.



In this post my objective is to give such a collection that helps you to address all of your designing relevant issues and give some solutions.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Fire bug is the most popular and powerful web development tool which give following and lot more
Inspect HTML and modify style and layout in real-time
Use the most advanced JavaScript debugger available for any browser
Accurately analyze network usage and performance
Extend Firebug and add features to make Firebug even more powerful

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks – both basic and advanced. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP/SFTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP/SFTP servers

FileZilla

This is a free FTP solution. Both a client and a server are available. FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License
FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
Features of FileZilla include the following:

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X and more
• IPv6 support
• Available in many languages
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
• Tabbed user interface
• Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
• Bookmarks
• Drag & drop support
• Configurable transfer speed limits
• Filename filters
• Directory comparison
• Network configuration wizard
• Remote file editing
• Keep-alive
• HTTP/1.1, SOCKS5 and FTP-Proxy support
• Logging to file
• Synchronized directory browsing
• Remote file search

GridFox

GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.More than just a handy development tool, GridFox also proves to be indispensable with the daily production of a grid-based site. Using GridFox, producers can easily check if their content maintains the grid, or if it needs to be edited. GridFox is the essential tool for creating and maintaining pixel-perfect, grid-based layouts

FontFinder

FontFinder is created for designers, developers and typographers. It allows a user to analyze the font information of any element on a page, copy any piece(s) of that information to the clipboard, and perform inline replacements to test new layouts.
FontFinder has 4 key pieces of functionality:

• Any font on a page can be completely analyzed
• Any piece of an element’s information can be copied to the clipboard
• Font-families can be disabled from the entire page, to test degradation for cross-OS support
• Any active element can have any piece of the font’s options (such as color, size or family) adjusted inline

SEOQuake

Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.

Window Resizer

The Browser Window Resizer is useful tool for testing different screen sizes. It accurately resizes your browser so you can test to see if the web page you’re working on looks right in all of the standard resolution sizes. Window resizer supports the 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1600×1200 resolution sizes.
The Firefox extension Resize the current page via the context menu, tool menu or toolbar button.
Window Resizer for Internet Explorer resize the current page via the context menu (right-click) only.
Supported Browsers: Firefox & older browsers like Internet Explorer

Screen Grab!

Screengrab! is an extension that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image – it’s a screen capture tool for Firefox!
With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page. You should really download it right now.
To use it just right-click the page you want to save and select an option from the “Screengrab” menu.

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