I have used Safari and Firefox for ages, but the featureset for Firefox has finally made me convert to using it as my full-time browser. I had been reluctant to make the final leap since Firefox still does not address the very handy Services menu in OS X. I use this function extensively, especially while browsing to save snippets of interest, but that was finally outweighed by the enormous amount of features available from the Firefox community.

View source chart - this has got to be one of the cooler ways to look at source code. Visually identifying and separating the code in a cohesive structure that allows an easy way to review the code. This is a great extension that will help anyone looking to learn more about CSS and standard code in general.



Along the same lines is the CSSViewer extension. This extensions pops a window with the CSS code for any DIV you place your cursor over. It is anotehr great way to dissect a page's code and learn more about CSS works (see image below).



Devboi provides a great reference pane for HTML, as well as additional libraries for PHP and Ruby on Rails.

Codetech is a full featured editor that you can use within Firefox. It offers some great features and is free!



Aardvark is an interesting plug that will highlight the elements on the page when you mouse over them. This is good for learning more about the structure of the document, but it also allows you to delete these items from view; handy for removing elements you do not want to print from the web, like navigation.

There are some tremendous opportunities to learn more, be a better programmer and extend the functionality of the software used to develop valid and compliant sites using Firefox. If you are a developer and you are not using Firefox I would suggest you give it a try. It may help streamline your workflow.

Tags: software, web, programming