For the majority of web designers, Firefox is the browser of choice. On our own humble little design-centric site we can see that approximately 53% of visitors use it. The vast majority of those also use the very latest version. This is largely in part due to the amazing degree of customization that can be done with Mozilla’s star pupil. The following add-ons, for us, have risen into the rarefied air of “must-haves”. As essential to the web design process as Photoshop, Fireworks, Red Bull, and Nickelback’s latest album cranked up on ITunes.  O.K., that last bit was as far from the truth as humanly possible, (personally we prefer Animal Collective) but you get the gist. Hey! Enough of our yapping. Onto the add-ons!

Firebug

In our opinion, the ne plus ultra of Firefox extensions. Essential for de-bugging CSS, HTML, javascript and generally just finding out just what the f**k you did wrong. It personally has saved us a lot of hair pulling in frustration. Luckily we have enough to spare. File this in the “Can’t Live Without” category.

ColorZilla 2.0.2

A nifty little bugger you can use for pulling the hexidecimal or RGB color value of any element on any web page. Great time saver. Perfect for finding that color that’s just right for your design.

YSlow

A Firefox add-on developed by Yahoo! It works in conjunction with Firebug and analyzes your page performance and offers suggestions on how to speed it up. We’ve found it useful on Wordpress platformed with a lot of plug-ins and other components. More of a developer’s tool than a designer’s, but we all know how those lines get blurred. According to some reports it also conflicts with online banking accounts so be aware of that little scenario before you download.

Web Developer 1.1.8

Another extremely popular tool for designers and developers. It has many of the same features as Firebug with a few different options like validation tools.

Window Resizer 1.0

Yes, we know you can do this with Web Developer, but you have to manually enter the dimensions. Window Resizer gives you a choice of six of the most common screen sizes so you can fix those blunders before you go live.

Palette Grabber 0.4.1

A great tool to commit larceny on other designer’s color schemes….oops, did we just say that? In all seriousness, you can use this to develop color palettes that can be imported right into Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X. Nice for inspiration to start building a color scheme for your site.

MeasureIt 0.3.9

We’ve gone back to this simple and incredibly useful tool time and time again. Just click and drag. It’s helpful for those suffering from OCD to get those placements EXACTLY perfect.

IE Tab and Opera View

Great for testing cross-browser compatibility with Internet Exploder (’scuse me…Explorer) and Opera. Now if they only had one for Safari…

GridFox 1.2

Nice simple layout tool to help place your elements just right if you’re working with a grid system. Nothing fancy here, just works..

Fire FTP

Although we love FileZilla, you can’t beat a FTP client that resides in your browser. Handles everything a stand-alone program can do, as well.

–James J Martin IV

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Stuff & Nonsense.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.