1. Web Developer

This is the Swiss army knife of Web development add-ons. Web Developer gives you a toolbar packed with useful features.

You can also turn off the toolbar and access the same features via Tools > Web Developer, or by right-clicking in the page. This is great for reducing toolbar clutter!

With the Web Developer add-on you can:

Temporarily disable browser features such as caching, JavaScript, images and CSS

View, manipulate, create and delete cookies

View and edit a page’s CSS and HTML on the fly

Manipulate forms and form data

View all sorts of details about elements in the page

Measure page elements with the Line Guides and Ruler features

Highlight different types of elements within the page (great for debugging CSS layouts)

Resize the browser window to various preset sizes (good for checking compatibility)

Validate a page’s HTML and CSS with the W3C validators

View a page’s JavaScript-generated source — fantastic for debugging AJAX stuff

In my opinion, Web Developer is an must-have tool if you do any sort of Web design or development work.

2. Firebug

Firebug is a comprehensive suite of debugging tools along the lines of Web Developer. You can enable it on a page-by-page basis by clicking the little bug icon in the status bar.

Amongst other things, you can use Firebug to:

View and edit the page’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Right-click any element in the page to inspect it

Add breakpoints to the page’s JavaScript to debug it at certain points

See the page’s DOM tree

View download times, bottlenecks and HTTP headers

It even has a built-in JavaScript command line and console for debugging (and it’s nicer than the JavaScript Debugger add-on too).

A nice thing about the HTML inspector is that its Layout view shows you the CSS box (margin, padding and so on) around the currently-inspected element, and adds rulers and guides to the page so you can check everything’s lined up. Very cool.

Personally I prefer to use the Web Developer add-on, as I find Firebug has (ironically) got rather buggy and slow recently. However, Firebug does have some neat features not in Web Developer, such as being able to inspect any element by right-clicking it, as well as the aforementioned JavaScript debugger and Layout view.

3. SEO for Firefox

There are quite a few Firefox add-ons that can help you with SEO, but SEO for Firefox is the best in my opinion. Search for your target keywords on Google or Yahoo!, then click the SEO icon in the status bar to turn on the add-on. It then adds all sorts of useful info to each entry in the search results page, such as:

The entry’s position in the search results (surprisingly useful!)

The page’s Google PageRank

Its age (the older the better from an SEO perspective)

Number of inbound links to the page

Number of bookmarks on del.icio.us

Alexa rank

…and lots more besides. Unlike some add-ons, it just displays links to this info by default, rather than the info itself. This is a good thing, as it reduces the chance of your computer being blocked by search engines and other sites for requesting too much info at once.

You have to sign up for an SEO Book account to get the add-on, but it’s worth it.

Other honourable mentions in this category include SEO Toolbar (also from SEO Book), Foxy SEO Tool and SearchStatus. These all work with the page you’re viewing, rather than with a search results page.

4. HTML Validator

Validating webpages is one of those chores that you know you should do, but inevitably end up forgetting about when it comes to putting the site live. The great thing about this add-on is that it “auto-validates” your pages as you view them; if you see a red cross in your status bar you know that the page has failed validation. No excuses!

You can use one of two validators (or both): SGML Parser (as used by the W3C validation service) or HTML Tidy. As a nice touch, the add-on includes a feature to clean up your page markup, as well as the ability to check that your page conforms to the WAI accessibility guidelines (priorities 1, 2 and 3).

5. Save Complete

I often want to mess about with an online webpage’s HTML and CSS for debugging purposes. Firebug and Web Developer let you do this to some extent, but they’re a bit limited and, of course, they only let you preview changes in Firefox.

Enter Save Complete. This lets you save a webpage along with all its assets (CSS, images, and so on) to a folder on your hard drive. You then have a full local copy of the page that you can edit to your heart’s content, and open with any browser on your computer. Very handy for debugging and testing.

Unlike Firefox’s regular Save Page As > Web Page, Complete option, this add-on really does save pretty much everything: JavaScript files, style sheets, images referenced from CSS, and so on. It’s not perfect but it does a really good job. Also handy if you want to archive a permanent copy of any webpage on your computer.

6. FireFTP

An entire FTP program inside your Web browser might sound like a terrible idea, but in fact FireFTP is rather swish. There’s something nice about having an FTP client always at hand in the browser, since that’s where you tend to spend most of the time when coding webpages.

You can open it in a separate window or in a tab, and it’s very easy to use. It also supports advanced stuff like TLS/SFTP, directory syncing, and even FXP. Many developers I know even prefer FireFTP to the separate Mozilla FTP client, FileZilla.

7. Screengrab

Takes screen shots of webpages. Great for sending mockups to clients. The nice thing about Screengrab is that it can capture the entire page, even if it doesn’t fit in the browser window. You can also grab just the visible portion of a page, or a selection. Screen shots can be saved out to files, or copied to the clipboard.

If you like Screengrab you might also like Shooter. It does the same basic job but it’s a bit easier to make selections. It can’t, however, copy the screen shot to the clipboard (at the time of writing).

8. HttpFox

This add-on lets you analyze, in real time, the data that is sent between Firefox and the Web server. You can see the full HTTP request and response headers; any sent or set cookies; posted form fields, and so on. This is handy if you do a lot of server-side coding using PHP, for example.

You can also filter on a string of text, which makes it really easy to find the particular header you’re after.

9. User Agent Switcher

Another one from the author of Web Developer, Chris Pederick. This add-on lets you alter the User-Agent string that Firefox sends to the Web server. This allows Firefox to impersonate other browsers such as IE and iPhone, and search engine crawlers such as Googlebot.

The Googlebot option has saved my bacon on at least one occasion when sites weren’t getting indexed by Google. It turned out that, when a site was accessed by Googlebot, it was triggering a bug in the site’s robot detection code and crashing the server. Doh!

10. ColorZilla

ColorZilla is a tool for analyzing colours in a webpage. Click its icon in the status bar, then hover the mouse over a pixel in the webpage to see its colour value. Click to select the colour; you can then right-click the status bar icon to copy the RGB values in a variety of formats for pasting into your style sheet.

Other handy features of ColorZilla include:

A Photoshop-style colour picker and palette browser

A zoom feature to make it easier to click a colour in the page

A DOM colour analyzer that gives you a palette of all colours used on the page, and lets you see which page elements use which colour

ColorZilla is a nice way to quickly eyedrop colours from a Web page without having to mess about in Photoshop. Great for CSS development.

Other Addons :

CSS Validator: CSS Validator adds a right-click option in your browser, sending the CSS to the W3C CSS Validator. It opens the results in a new tab. CSS Validator is a nice tool that will come in handy often.

FirePHP: FireBug is a fine tool for CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, but FirePHP, which only works when you have the FireBug extension installed, creates a full-featured development experience. With the help of both add-ons, you can view the quality of your PHP and find errors. It’s a great aid.

Font Finder: Font Finder allows you to highlight a font you like on any site, right-click on the selection, and after choosing “Font Finder”, view the full CSS text styling of the selection. You can then paste that into your own Web page.

Aardvark – A cool extension for web developers and designers, allows them to view CSS attributes, id, class by highlighting page element individually.

Flash Switcher – Use this extension to avoid reloading between flash plugins.

Window Resizer – Automatically resize your browser window between 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1600×1200 to see how pages appear at these resolutions.

Screen grab – Capture screenshot of any webpage and save it as an image file with this extension.

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Google Chrome recently expanded its wings by launching Chrome Extensions center and made them available for their latest version which always helps them in gaining popularity at least among bloggers who depends on Firefox extensions. I have compiled the list of best extensions for bloggers.

Zemanta: Zemanta is the chrome extension which doesn’t require any special desciption. Once installed it sits in the Blog dashboard and expands the author’s scope of blogging by populating the relevant suggestions of text, links, images which can be used in the posts.

Blog This:  Once Installed this chrome extension allows you to post the web page to blogger blog.

Chrome SEO: This Chrome extension provides various fields tools like Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks and other tools which are essential for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO Status Pagerank/Alexa Toolbar: The name itself briefs the functionality of this chrome extension, It dispalys the Pagerank and Alexa rank of the website.

Snippy: Snippy chrome extension allows you to grab snippets like images links and paragraphs with intact formatting and preserves the rich content from web pages and save them for future use.

This is our list of what we think are 5 must have Google Chrome extensions for bloggers. I think your choices might vary since there are multiple extensions available for every purpose in Google Chrome. Let us know if we missed your favorite extensions for blogging in the comments below. Thank you.

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If you look at GetBrowser for instance you notice that 47% of all visitors that visited our site in the last year have been using Firefox followed by 35% Internet Explorer users, 7.34% Google Chrome users, 4.31% Safari and 3.52% Opera users. It is likely that the stats look similar on other technology sites whereas general websites still see Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at the top.

The picture changes if you look at the stats of December 2009. Firefox lost almost 8% and ranks with 39% behind Internet Explorer which gained 6% and is now at 41%. Google Chrome managed to get another 2% and is close to breaking into the two digits with 9.67%. Safari and Opera both dropped about 0.5% each.

There are two main reasons for the change: Basic keyword optimization brought new visitors to the website of which many prefer Internet Explorer over other web browsers. The second reason is the release of Internet Explorer 8 in March of 2009 which boosted the stats for Internet Explorer.

Google Chrome manages to get marketing share because it it actively promoted by Google on sites like Amazon but also on Google’s own site as well.

Web Browser Predictions:

Google Chrome will reach 15-20% of market share on tech sites by year’s end.

Opera and Safari will not be able to gain significant market share.

Internet Explorer will lose market share (Internet Explorer 8 will gain but 6 and 7 will lose)

Firefox will lose market share

I will – on a personal note – likely switch from Firefox to either Google Chrome or Opera. Firefox is a great web browser and the main reason for running it as the main web browser are its extensions. But it feels slow and memory hungry. The likely choice as of know is Google Chrome as it supports the Last Pass extension. If someone would port NoScript I would switch immediately.

Could be that I switch back to Firefox once the devs release Firefox 3.6 or 3.7 although 3.6 cannot compete with the speed of Google Chrome or Opera 10.5 alpha. Opera would be the prime choice if the developer’s would consider better extension support so that popular extensions could be ported to the web browser.

So, what about you? Will you switch web browsers in 2010? What has to happen to make you switch?

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Firefox for Mobile (Fennec) version 1.0 release candidate for Nokia Maemo based N800/N810/N900 is out (Fennec for Windows Mobile is still in alpha). You can also experiment on your desktop with Firefox for mobile, provide feedback, build add-ons, and get involved by installing it on your desktop PC: for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

You can view Firefox for Mobile 1.0RC release notes as well as download links for Maemo, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X,Here.

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While Chrome can’t yet match Firefox’s massive extension ecosystem, more useful extensions are becoming available for Google’s browser every day. Here are my must-have extensions for the new Google Chrome user:

Brizzly. Since I am trying to better integrate Twitter and Facebook into my professional communications in 2010, the Brizzly extension, which is a Twitter and Facebook reading/updating tool, ranks as a must-have in my book.

Google Reader Notifier. Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice, so the Google Reader Notifier Extension was a natural choice for me.

html2pdf. This extension enables you to save the HTML page you are viewing to PDF. I find this extension handy when I want to save a receipt or a piece of research.

Shareaholic for Google Chrome. This extension lets you share web pages through major social media sites and other services, like Gmail and Evernote.

Google Apps Shortcuts. This shortcut provides easy access to all of your Google Apps, including Google Wave and Google Voice. You can even begin creating new email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations using this extension.

Evernote Web Clipper. We’ve written about Evernote in the past, and the Evernote extension provides the same web clipping functionality you already enjoy in Mozilla Firefox and in Internet Explorer. I use the web clipper whenever I want to capture research from the web.

Xmarks Bookmarks Sync. One of the biggest draws of Firefox for me was the capability to sync bookmarks across my home office PCs. Now with the Xmarks Bookmarks Sync extension you can have the same feature using Chrome.

Aviary Screen Capture. I take a lot of screen captures, and like the fact that Aviary Screen capture lets you capture and manipulate screen captures from within Google Chrome.

Bit.ly. This extension comes in handy if you need fast access to a URL shortener. Clicking on the Bit.ly extension launches a sidebar.

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This is usually something that can also be achieved with searches in the search engines but the extension makes the process comfortable thanks to its integration in the web browser. The extension will place an icon in the header toolbar of the Google Chrome web browser which will display a small overlay window upon activation that suggests four websites that Google has determined to be similar to the active one.

A click on the button at the Google main website for instance suggests Yahoo, Bing, MSN and Wikipedia. It is sometimes the case that some of the suggestions are not as similar as they could be. Google could for instance improve the suggestion for their homepage by removing MSN and Wikipedia and adding two search engines instead.

It would also be nice if there would be an option to display more than four suggestions for similar pages. Google Similar Pages is an extension for the Google Chrome 4 web browser. It is available at the official Google Chrome extension website where it can be installed directly.

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This is the first screen you’ll see in Firefox Mobile. The application has a skin on top of the existing user interface which I suspect slows it down a bit. Still, it looks like a typical Maemo application with the “switch apps” icon in the top left and the “close” in the top right.

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As per IBTimes, Google Chrome OS netbook will incorporate Nvidia Tegra platfrom, possibly Tegra 2 expected next year, and ARM design CPU. The Chrome OS is x86 architecture compatible but will support virtualization only on select devices. Furthermore, this Chrome OS netbook will sport 10.1 inch TFT Multi-touch display that would be HD ready. Yes, you read it right that the netbook will support multi-touch.

For storage, 64GB SSD would be offered and rest will be relied on Cloud-based storage which the user will have to choose, obviously. Packing 2GB RAM, the other features include Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, USB ports, Ethernet port, integrated webcam, audio port (3.5mm), multimedia card reader, etc.

This netbook is rumored arrive in holiday 2010 season at a subsidized price of $300 (Rs. 14,400 approx.) in U.S. It’s possible that Acer would be the first one to roll out this netbook after their bold claims. Nevertheless, at the subsidized pricing, the rumored netbook features sound too good to be true.

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History 2 is an extension for the Google Chrome browser that offers a different approach to displaying the web browser’s history. The biggest difference between History 2 and the default history manager is that the former sorts the history entries by domain.

That coupled with the option to collapse all history entries of a domain make the history manager more comfortable to work with especially if domains are listed with dozens or even hundreds of visited pages.

History 2 can display the history of the last six days or the whole week. There is no option to go further back than that which is something that the developer should consider improving so that all of the history is displayed in the history manager.

The only option to search history entries that data back to more than seven days is to use the original history manager of the Chrome web browser.

History 2 is an extension for the Google Chrome 4 web browser which can be installed directly at the official Google Chrome extension’s site.

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Jay Sullivan who was in charge of the project said that the mobile version underwent various tests and would be launched by the end of the year. He also added a user would not have to sit in the evening and work on their PC, instead he would be able to walk. In case he received some urgent documents that he had to read there would be no necessity to back home and check his e-mail, as his mobile would be equipped with Firefox mobile version.

The version is able to encrypt all the information a user receives and sends it back through the cloud. Also it can sync with the desktop version of the browser.

In case everything goes smoothly, the owners of N900 will be able to download Firefox that can be found in Nokia’s Ovi store.

Also Mozila which is considered to be the parent company of Firefox, is developing versions for Google’s Android as well as Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

Those who have, iPhones and want to have Firefox on their desktop, they will have to wait a bit, as the company has to synchronize their desktop.

But still Opera is considered to be the most popular mobile browser at present. It is available for many mobile handsets.

(Via theLatestNews)

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