Software Daily News

I divided this article in three sections – Web development, Social development related plugins and finally just overall handy plugins for better browsing.

Also I must remind you, you will not find already popular and well known extensions here, since the mayor community already are know such plugins like – GreaseMonkey, WebDeveloper or Firebug tools for example. Just scroll through the list, check screenshots and hopefully several of these plugins will be useful for your daily Firefox internet browsing.

Web Development Related Firefox Plugins

1.Palette Grabber 0.4.1

Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X based on the current page. This plugin is great using together with ColorPicker, actually extends possibilities.

2.LinkChecker

Check the validity of links on any web page, this plugin is good for web designers and actually bloggers too.

There’s also a tool-bar button that can be added for easier access to LinkChecker. Just right click on your tool-bar, choose “Customize” and look for the button with the underlined blue check.

3.View Cookies

Just a little bit faster and handier way how to check site cookies.

It adds a tab to the Page Info dialog box, which shows the cookies of the

current web-page. This is interesting for developers, privacy-conscious users and others.

4.ViewSourceWith

The main goal consists to view page source with external applications but you can also…

- open page source as DOM document, read faq

- open CSS and JS files present on page

- open images using your preferred image viewer (e.g. GIMP or ACDSee)

- open PDF links with Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader or what you prefer

- edit textboxes content with your preferred editor and automatically see modified text on browser when you re-switch focus on it, this simplifies wiki pages editing, read faq

- open server side pages that generate the browser content, this simplifies web developer’s debug, read server-faq

- open files listed in Javascript console. When editor open file the cursor can be moved to line number shown on javascript console, read js faq

For desperate cases you can add Microsoft IE to editor list.

5.Text Link 3.1.

Allows URI texts written in webpages to be loaded by double clicks.

Without this extension, when you discover an URI text not linked, like “http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/”, you have to do following steps to load the page:

1. Select the URI text completely. (It may be a hard work if the page is rendered with a proportional font. This operation always chafes me.)

2. Copy it. (press “Ctrl-C” or use “Copy” from the “Edit” menu)

3. Paste it to the location bar.

4. Press “Enter”. Then, Firefox loads it.

or,

1. Select the URI text completely. (It chafes me again!)

2. Drag the selection string to the tab bar and drop it. Then, Firefox loads it.

With this extension, you can load the URI only following one step:

1. Double-click on the URI text. Then, Firefox loads it. I’m happy.

6.Custom Buttons

Gives a possibility to create custom toolbar buttons – beautiful for designers or just personalized theme lovers, suited for me perfectly at least!

7.Subtile

Subtile is a Firefox extension that provides generic support for toolbar menus.

The menu can be located anywhere in the browser toolbars, attached to an icon that can change its appearance when an event occurs.

If you are a Webmaster, you can create your own menus and distribute them easily to your users. With the dynamic capabilities of Subtile, you can alert people when some content has changed or new messages are available.

If you are simply a curious Web user, enjoy the available menu configurations from http://www.subtile.net/subtiles.php or build easily your own video site monitor from http://www.downloadhelper.net/st-build.php

8.FirePHP

FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call.

FirePHP is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON or XML responses are required. All data is sent via a set of X-FirePHP-Data response headers. This means that the debugging data will not interfere with the content on your page.

You must have Firebug installed and the “Net” panel enabled to use this extension.

You must also download a PHP library from http://www.firephp.org/HQ/

9.FireShot

FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages (entirely or just visible part).

Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.

The captures can be:

- uploaded to FREE public screenshot hosting;

- saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP);

- printed;

- copied to clipboard;

- e-mailed;

- sent to configurable external editor for further processing;

10.SenSeo

SenSEO analyzes web pages and tells you how good they fulfill on-page Search Engine Optimization criteria. SenSEO is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. The code is based on the YSlow extension. SenSEO gives you:

- Overview of SEO-important web page components

- Analysis of on-page-SEO-criteria

In the current version SenSEO checks:

- Correct usage of Document-Title, Meta-Description and Meta-Keywords

- Headlines, Domain and URL-Path

- Other general content-criteria

You must install Firebug.

11.Foxy SEO

Foxy SEO Tool is a free, open source toolbar that provides quick and easy access to a multitude of search engine functions such as Google Site, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live Fromlinks. Also included are famous web traffic analysis sites such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, popular statistic aggregators like Quarkbase and WebSiteOutlook. You can check a site’s listing in important directories like Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory, buzzing Web 2.0 sites such as Technocrati, Wikipedia, Digg, Delicious and links to useful network functions like Whois, Geotool, Internet Archive, etc.

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