this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

The Moleskin has a good entry about Firefox extensions for web development. Two extensions that I use quite often are the Firefox web developer extension and Firebug. They are two really useful extensions for me and they allow me to develop sites more efficiently. Looking over the other extensions they seem to offer web developers some handy tools.

The Aardvark extension seems to be useful, but Firebug seems to outline and find the element in the DOM so that is the tool of choice for me for that issue.

Colorzilla is useful, but I develop mostly on a Mac and use Digital Color Meter because it can be used on any element on my screen.

While I do keep accessibility in mind, using an extension like Fang doesn’t seem too useful to me. As long as the text is readable on my sites that?s all that really matters to me.

The Web Developer extension has the ability to do link checking so having a separate extension for that seems a little unnecessary to me.

Measure It seems quite useful and I don’t think too many extensions offer that feature on screen. Firebug does show width and height of an element, but the user needs to click a few times in order to grab the information.

ScreenGrab looks to be a great extension. I have quite a few uses for this. Too bad I can’t use it with other browsers. It would be quite useful to analyze sites in different browsers, but at least it is available to Firefox.

Since I am mostly on a Mac IE View has almost no use for me. I can see when it could be useful at times on my PC, but for right now I don’t think I would need it for everyday web development.

I like to keep my FTP software separate when I do web development. I don’t use Dreamweaver or any of the other build in FTP clients in the web development software. I think I can keep better track of things without it.

HTML Validator seems like a pretty good tool as well. I don’t tend to have a lot of errors when I code so a simple validation at the end seems to work for me. I can deal with fixing a few errors at the end.

Firebug is probably one of the most useful extensions that I use on an everyday basis. It allows me to complete tasks faster and more accurately and that is what is important in web development.

If you have any other extensions feel free to leave a message and let other readers know.