The 15 addons listed on this page are useful for Web power users like Web designers, Web developers, and ecommerce merchants. The addons are broken down into the following groups:
- Top 42 Most Useful Firefox Addons (Table of Contents)
- 14 Addons for All Internet Users
- 13 Addons for Content Consumers and Producers (Social Media Mavens, Bloggers)
- 15 Addons for Web Workers (Web Designers, Web Developers, Ecommerce Merchants)
- Ecommerce / ebay Merchants (2)
- Moving Big Files Around(3)
- Chatting (1)
- Get Information About a Webpage (or Site) (9)
Ecommerce - ebay
28. Firefox Companion for eBay
Official add-on from eBay that basically creates a miniturized My eBay in your Firefox sidebar. It also pops up alerts for both sellers and buyers. (screenshot)
You can also get this functionality outside Firefox using the eBay toolbar for IE.
29. Track Packages
Highlight a tracking number on a webpage (eg., in an email), right-click and select "Track Package". The extension will automatically figure out which carrier the tracking number is for, and send you to the proper tracking webpage. (screenshot)
Carriers supported include UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL, Canada Post, and more.
Moving Big Files Around
30. FireFTP
Embedded an FTP client into Firefox. ( screenshot)
Finds the videos on a webpage and makes it easy to download them. (screenshot) Supports YouTube, MySpace, Google videos, DailyMotion, and other Flash based video sites. Can also be used for audio and images.
32. DownThemAll!
Download manager / accelerator within Firefox. If you download a lot of big files, this addon speeds up downloads using multiple streams, and lets you pause and resume downloads. (screenshot)
Chatting
33. Chatzilla
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client within Firefox. IRC is an early form of chat that is still popular with developers.
Get Information About a Webpage (or Site)
If you need to deal with HTML, CSS, JS, or you need to get stats and "look into" websites, these are the extensions for you.
34. Search Status
Displays Google PageRank and Alexa rank in the status bar. (See screenshot)
Right-clicking on the display lets you get more information about the page. For example, you can highlight all the nofollow links, show backlink counts from the major search engines, see the site's whois information, and more.
As a Web worker, I like using a site's PageRank to quickly determine it's general popularity -- and indirectly, it's legitimacy.
35. ScreenGrab
ScreenGrab makes it easy to take webpage screenshots. You can save just the visible part, the full webpage, or just a selection. You can save the image as a PNG or JPG. (JPG will usually have a smaller filesize.)
This is one of my favorite extensions because of the selection feature. If you choose "selection", you're prompted to draw a box around the part of the page you want to take a screenshot of, and viola! You have a pre-cropped screenshot. I take a screenshot at least once a week, and having this addon means I don't have to fire up Photoshop just to crop big screenshots.
36. MeasureIt
When you click on the MeasureIt button in the status bar, you can drag a rectangle around the webpage. The size of the rectangle is displayed. (screenshot) You can use this addon to measure anything on a webpage -- images, page width, etc.
37. ColorZilla
Adds an eyedropper to the status bar. When you want to the know exactly what color is being used on a webpage, click the eyedropper and mouseover the color you're curious about. ColorZilla will tell you the color specs in RGB, HSV and other formats. It also lets you easily copy-and-paste the color information.
Very handy for Web designers (and Web marketing folks who have design input).
Adds a tab to the Page Info screen ("Tools > Page Info" or cntl-shift-P) that displays all the files (images, videos, CSS, Javascript, etc) used to build the current webpage. (screenshot)
(A Web version of this functionality is Pingdom's Full Page Test.)
39. Web Developer
Adds a toolbar with tools for Web developers. (screenshot) Some of the things you can do:
- Edit the CSS for the page being displayed to preview how your changes look.
- Resize the browser window to (configurable) pre-set sizes. For example, you might want to have the ability to resize your browser to 1024x768 pixels. Doing so will give you an idea of what's above/below the fold.
- View the sizes of all images on the page.
- Draw borders around all the divs on the page.
- View what the webpage looks like using the print CSS.
- ... and a bunch of other stuff.
Firebug (next addon) is newer and seemingly more powerful, but I still mostly depend on Web Developer.
40. Firebug
Advanced debugger for Web developers. You can also install additional plugins to make Firebug more useful.
Firebug is very powerful (from what I've seen), but lacks clear documentation. Sometimes I still prefer good old Web Developer for its simplicity.
Firebug Links:
Lets you switch the user agent of the browser. This is useful, for example, if you send mobile browsers to a version of your site optimized for the small screen, and want to test out what mobile Web browsers will see.
42. IE Tab
Use the Internet Explorer (IE) rendering engine in one of your tabs. This is helpful if you need to look to see how a website will be displayed in IE (and you didn't want to launch IE).
It's also useful if you need to have multiple logins active at the same time on one site. This addon essentially provides an "extra" browser with its own cache and cookies.