Let's talk a little bit about the coolest web browser ever. Of course I'm not talking about
Safari, recently available for Windows users, which doesn't knows how to
render fonts in a way that we're familiar with, and by the way which new version is better at rendering my blog than the one I used when posted
my first impressions about it. And of course I'm not talking about Internet Explorer as well, as if you thought about IE when read "coolest web browser ever", I'm pretty sure that you haven't give a chance to any other browser.
No, I'm talking about
Mozilla Firefox.
It's quite easy to explain why Firefox is the coolest ever: because it's extensible. So extensible that it can be turned on an
iTunes-like media player or a
GNU/Linux desktop environment. Try do the same with other browser.
The funniest thing about Firefox is that there is a plenty of extensions available for free (as in "free beer", this time). And if you take a look at your friends' Firefox, you will quickly realize that is hard to find two identical Firefox installations. Besides those who have stock installations. By the way, I think that those stock Firefox installations are not so cool at the first sight, and this may be the reason that drives some people away from it. Maybe Firefox installer should bundle some popular extensions...
So, if you are a web developer, having a tuned Firefox will help you a lot. Even if you write intranet applications which are supposed to run in (and be compliant with) other browsers, these two Firefox extensions can save you a lot of time.
The first one is
Firebug, an extremely popular extension which allows developers to inspect all source code of a page. And when I say "all", I mean HTML, CSS and JavaScript source code. Even the source code in external referenced files. Firebug also gives you the ability to tweak your pages' code on-the-fly. You can navigate through DOM and change any properties then see the result imediatly. You can also debug the JavaScript code running in that page, and much more. Firebug is so sophisticated that you can find extensions for it (the extension of the extension). The
Yahoo! YSlow extension gives you performance improvement hints for a page. For each hint there is a corresponding link explaining why and how the solution will speedup the page loading. Firebug is a must-have extension for any web developer.
The second is called
Web Developer extension, which besides having some redundant features found in Firebug, also allow you to watch a page behaviour under certain conditions, like a lower resolution display, or a browser not accepting cookies or not JavaScript/CSS capable. This extension is specially useful for those developing
accessible web content, making easier to see how a page will behave when rendered by a text-based browser, or interpreted by a screen reader. The Web Developer extension is specially handy to make visible the invisible elements of a page, like forms, tables and links.
These two extensions make Firefox a powerful web development IDE, giving to the developer the control and full understanding of how its web page works.
