Web development gets a lot easier when you use Firefox, which comes with an agreeable number of bells and whistles built in. However, it gets much better still when you install some of the addons that the Mozilla community has on offer. In particular, the following addons make the web developer’s life much easier.

Note that these package descriptions were shamelessly copied from Firefox’s addons page:

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Get it here: getfirebug.com

Greasemonkey

Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Check out wiki.greasespot.net to get started.

Get it here: www.greasespot.net

Web Developer

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

Get it here: chrispederick.com/work/web-developer

FoxyProxy Standard

FoxyProxy is a Firefox extension which automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns. Put simply, FoxyProxy automates the manual process of editing Firefox’s Connection Settings dialog. Proxy server switching occurs based on the loading URL and the switching rules you define.

Get it here: foxyproxy.mozdev.org

iMacros for Firefox

iMacros was designed to automate the most repetitious tasks on the web. If there’s an activity you have to do repeatedly, just record it in iMacros. The next time you need to do it, the entire macro will run at the click of a button! With iMacros, you can quickly and easily fill out web forms, remember passwords, create a webmail notifier, download information from other sites, scrape the Web (get data from multiple sites), and more. You can keep the macros on your computer for your own use, or share them with others by embedding them on your homepage, blog, company Intranet or any social bookmarking service. The uses are limited only by your imagination!

Get it here: www.iopus.com/imacros/firefox/

Stylish

User styles are themes for web sites. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you customize web sites. Take out irrelevant content, change colors, or completely redesign the entire site. You can even use user styles as themes on the interface of Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey themselves.

Get it here: userstyles.org

ColorZilla

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

Get it here: www.colorzilla.com

Pixlr Grabber

Making screen grabs and pulling down images from the web just got a bit more easy. With the Pixlr grabber add-on you can choose to Edit, Share, Save or Copy your final grabs. You also get the possibility to right-click any image or background to edit them.

Get it here: www.pixlr.com

ShowIP

Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.

Get it here: code.google.com/p/firefox-showip/

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Get it here: fireftp.mozdev.org

Happy coding!