I just wanted to mention some of the Firefox extension which I use to make life so much easier while developing for the web. These are tools that I make use of every day, and want to make sure that everyone knows about!

First and foremost, there is FireBug. I am so glad that Mozilla threw this in with Firefox version 2. I would have had no idea about it, at least not until someone else sang it’s praises, otherwise. This is the single most used tool that makes my job that much easier! Javascript debugging, Ajax callbacks, examining HTML, benchmarking network bottlenecks…. the list goes on! My only gripe thus far is that in Firefox version 3 there are certain HTML elements, such as buttons, which I can’t right click on and use the ‘Inspect Element’ tool. On the whole, it’s wonderful!

Next come the Firebug plugins… FirePHP is the first. This allows me to send debugging information in a HTTP header, and then view the result in the FireBug console. While I could just dump exceptions and errors straight to the screen this little gem allows me to show the same screen the user would experience in such a situation, but at the same time see detailed debugging information! It is great for use on my local development system, as well as our testing server!

After FirePHP, there is FireCookie! While, this extension isn’t as used as the above two it is still a wonderful addition to my toolset. With it I am able to see any changes to cookies in the FireBug console. Very useful while testing Ajax scripts which may or may not make changes.

Lastly… this isn’t a development tool, but interesting nonetheless. FireGPG is a tool which will encrypt/decrypt GPG blocks right in your browser window! Not highly useful, but it works and you can run into the odd encrypted block out there. It’s not a key store though, so you have to have GPG already installed and point FireGPG to it.

Hope someone finds these useful as well! :)

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