12 January 2009 in Tools | Comments enabled

I’ve always used extensions with Firefox but only really one or two. Recently I’ve started using a few more and finding them super handy. Perhaps I’m late to the party but who cares – lets call it fashionably late. For those of you who haven’t seen these extensions then perhaps they’ll help you too. If I’ve missed any you think help developers then post a comment!

FireBug

Firebug in action

What would any list of Firefox extensions be without FireBug? If you’re using the Web Developer Toolbar then it’s time to move on up to FireBug. FireBug just makes web development so much easier with features like JavaScript debugging, providing network data, giving you in depth style information and a whole lot more. I’m sure a small book could be written on this fantastic tool so I won’t go on too much about it.

FireBug homepage

HttpFox

httpfox in action

Every now and then the network monitoring ability of FireBug lets you down. It’s powerful but not superman tough by any means. Enter HttpFox. HttpFox is a much more powerful network monitoring add-in which will provide you with truck loads of information about what’s going in and out of your browser.

One annoyance with FireBug is the need to force a re-post of values to see what the response to a POST action was. This is where HttpFox helps out – it just does everything all the time. Good Times. Thanks to Jeremy for pointing me in the direction of this great add-in.

HttpFox Homepage

S3Fox

S3Fox in action

You’re storing your data on Amazon’s S3 service right? No? Well perhaps you should. S3 is a great services for storing large amounts of data and making it available on the web in a very inexpensive manner. The downside is that tooling support is somewhat limited which is exactly the problem that S3Fox resolves.

Once installed it’s like getting a file explorer for S3 right inside your browser. Manage ACL’s, upload files, do everything you need.

S3Fox Homepage

TwitterFox

twitterfox in action

Lots of geeks are on twitter but it can be time suck. TwitterFox nicely integrates into FireFox and means you don’t need to sit there on the Twitter site or with a dedicated application running. Every now and then it pops up and shows recent tweets which is handy. Saves the whole “oh, I best go refresh the page!” syndrome.

TwitterFox Homepage

I hope that helps – if you’re on twitter then feel free to add me here. Also, if you’re new to my blog then why not subscribe to my rss feed?

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3 comments. Add your own comment.

Steven Quick says 12 January 2009 @ 15:23

Hey cool I didn’t know about HttpFox, the UI is a lot better than what I was using eg: Live Http Headers (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829)

I would recommend FlagFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5791 and of course YSlow: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

Ivan says 14 January 2009 @ 06:20

ooooh s3 fox :) been thinking about getting an account for a while. that does look useful.

James says 10 February 2009 @ 07:45

HTTPFox looks like a winner – I’ll have to grab it :-) SQLite manager is another great tool for creating/modifying/inspecting SQLite db’s. you can grab that here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5817

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