11 November 06
This week’s Friday Five is Firefox add-ons (née extensions) that I can’t live without. Honestly, I’d die without them…
Adblock Plus
I hate adverts. Everyone hates adverts. Global-mega-hyper-companies trying to sell you overpriced products you would never buy in a milllion years. If I wanted to know how to get a bigger penis, buy some viagra, or get a loan that would empty my bank account with its interest, I would google them and not trust a dodgy ad. Adblock is perfect for removing 99.9% of all adverts from websites. When I visit sites without it turned on, the amount of ads I see reminds me what a nicer browsing experience I have and why I love Adblock so much.
Firebug
A year ago, I’d be surprised to learn how much Javascript I do now. I do a ton of the stuff. If Javascript was a drug, I’d be in the Priory right now. Firebug is the perfect Javascript debugger. It’s amazingly powerful, and I use it all the time. If you do any type of Javascript, you need Firebug. It will make you a better Javascript programmer.
Google Browser Sync
When the IT staff at work told me I couldn’t use my laptop as “they don’t support it”, it pissed me off. I have all my important procrastination tools on my lappy, such as my bookmarks and my feed reader. I hate having to go to the trouble of manually adding these things. This is the internet. I shouldn’t have to do manual tasks. This is where Google Browser Sync comes in, and it does what it says on the tin. It syncs up browsers so that whenever you sign in on a browser with the extension, it will merge your bookmarks, history, cookies, etc, so that you can find that site you were looking at at home but now can’t find at work. Just make sure you remember to remove the porno bookmarks.
Tab Mix Plus
To be honest, I don’t use Tab Mix Plus as much as I used to now that I use Firefox 2. This is mainly because Firefox 2 is basically Firefox 1.5 with bits of Tab Mix Plus integrated plus a few minor changes. I don’t know why Firefox didn’t go all the way and integrate it all (well, I do, it’s to ‘stop bloat’) because it’s an amazing little add-on. After installing Tab Mix Plus, you wonder why you ever put up with no way to recover accidently closing tabs. It’s still a lot more powerful than Firefox’s vanilla tab system and it’s especially handy if, like me, you use the internet a lot. And I use the internet a lot.
Web Developer Toolbar
Any developer who is without this toolbar is a fucking tool. Seriously. If you’re a developer and haven’t heard of this, you’re a bad developer. If I had to choose one add-on to take with me to a desert island, it would be this. This is the one reason I wouldn’t switch to another browser. Yes, other browsers are faster, other browsers look cooler, but they don’t have web developer toolbar, do they??? No, of course not! I’d rather not waste half my day figuring out why CSS is acting wonky when I can use the Web Dev toolbar and find out in 5 seconds.
So… what do you think? Any majorly important ones that I’ve missed out. You have a favourite that hardly anyone knows about? Comment!
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I agree about the usefullness of the webdeveloper toolbar, but you are a little “behind”: There is a similar toolbar for both IE and Opera. And while the IE version looks ugly and lacks some features, the Opera one is sexy and mighty.
A very intersting feature of the Opera version is to display pages like they are displayed on other devices: Screenreaders, mobiles, PDAs.
@J Phill: Apprantely you can middle click to close a tab now, which is a bit useless to me being on a Mac laptop… I agree about Colorzilla being a great extension too. I don’t use MeasureIt, mainly because of the ruler included with the Webdev toolbar. But it is dead handy for converting pesky flat images into sexy sites.
@Jörn: I’ve been using the IE toolbar for quite a while. Not a big fan of it to be honest. Mainly because of the way it can’t figure out its own bugs. Not tried the Opera version yet, I’ll give it a spin later!
Comment by J Phill on 16 November 2006, 15:03
Ah, the web developer toolbar helps me sleep at night! haha. But I couldn’t agree with you more, and it is the most useful tool that I’ve ever come across since becoming a designer.
I like Tab Mix Plus, although in the previous 1.5 version I had this add-on (ext.) called Super T that I like alot. It had a feature where I could just double click to close a tab, and I didn’t realize how useful it was until I didn’t have it, because they haven’t upgraded it to 2.0. Or maybe it’s somewhere else, who knows.
Another that I love is Colorzilla. It allows you to use the eyedropper in the browser and pick out colors and whatnot and provides the hex code. It’s priceless, and I use that a ton too.
Last one I’d recommend is called MeasureIt, where it allows you to use a ruler (in pixels) for a browser. I don’t use it a ton, but it’s come in handy a few times.