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12/07/2006: "Currently playing with - Firefox addons"

Until recently, I've left Firefox pretty much untouched, both in 1.5 and 2.0 form. However, after picking up the faviconize addon from one of Meri's posts, a while back, I've been looking at a few of the other addons available.

Faviconize Tab

Simple, yet incredibly useful. Allows you to squash any tab down to favicon size (so for this page you would just see the 'W' icon). I'm using it in combination with the 'Show my windows and tabs from last time' option (standard in FF) to make sure I've always got tabs for the sites I look at every day (ebay, BBC news, etc) without filling up the entire tab bar.

Web Developer Toolbar

As the name might suggest, this is probably only of interest to people who create web content in one way or another. I've only really played with it so far but it offers a huge range of tools for inspecting web pages. I'd say the key ones are the ability to view pages without CSS, validate CSS and HTML at the touch of a button, suppress images and highlight images without alt tags. So far it's highlighted a couple of things in previous posts where I had managed to make Greymatter output invalid HTML (including quotation marks in post titles is one of them). Now fixed.

IETab

Again, probably only of interest to the web developer, allows you to emulate IE in a Firefox tab. Useful for discovering those little 'quirks' that Bill's Browser has in interpreting HTML. At least four out of five people are daft enough to use it, so you need to be able to deal with them. This allows you to do it without actually opening IE.

New Tab URL

Fixes a missing feature in FF which has bugged me in the past - when I load a new tab, 90% of the time it's because I want to google something I've found in another page. This addon allows you to specify what is loaded in the new tab rather than just giving you a blank tab.