Saturday, January 03, 2009

Y i love Mozilla Firefox



‘Am a die hard fan of Mozilla Firefox. And for good reasons. It has a well thought out user interface, its fast, does well in supporting web standards and it is secured. But what really makes it a killer APP for me (and ‘am sure for a whole lot of others) is its extensible nature that is achieved via plug-ins. This has transformed Mozilla Firefox from yet another browser for surfing the web into a development tool for me as a developer.


If you do a lot of interface design and development, like I do, you will find, in Mozilla Firefox add-ons, a varied number of plug-ins that will prove useful to you in your everyday work. My all time favorites are listed below:

Color-zilla


Color zilla is cool. This add-on allows you access to both the RGB and hexadecimal color representation on web pages. See a particular hue on a page you like and you wish to use in your design? Just hover its color picker on the color and you have access to the color code representation. Adding the plug-in will append this to the bottom of your browser:


Now before colorzilla, the processes of getting a color I will like to use from another webpage normally involves snapping the screen shots, moving it to fireworks where I can then use firework’s color picker tool!


Find Colorzilla here

Web developer


This is a life saver! Any day anytime. It is a mini suit of different tools that offers a whole lot of functionality. You will find tools that help in getting information about a page structure to tools that help you work with CSS, Forms, Images, cookies and validation; it’s great.

Find web developer tool here

Firebug


This is the king when it comes to JavaScript debugging. No contest!
Find firebug here.


Other useful plug-ins include:GreaseMonkey, Yslow by Yahoo!, CSS validator and FirePHP.

Discover more useful Add-ons at Firefox offical spot for add-ons

It is needless to say that none of these functionality that makes Mozilla Firefox such a useful software for me is found in the bare Firefox install. They are all plug-in powered. And this is the power of an extensible platform. It is a fact that an extensible platform, open up to the community, always makes good for a winning strategy.Google knows this, and I guess that’s the reason why their next step for chrome is to enable people to build plug-in for it, as hinted at in this article.

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