Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

Firebug Beta 1 Released

The beta of Firebug 1.0 has been released and comes with some amazingly useful features. For those unfamiliar with this Firefox extension, Firebug provides a wealth of tools for developers to debug, monitor or edit portions of a site. Portions of it overlap the Web Developer’s toolbar, and in several cases, Firebug surpasses it hands down. Some of the features include:

• Inspect & edit HTML & CSS within the browser to see how changes will impact the current page.
• Visualize CSS metrics, including box model shading, measurements for each edge of a box (and the ability to edit those measurements in-line) , rulers and guides
• Monitor network activity to see why a page takes too long to load, broken down by type. You can also see which items are cached or not and examine HTTP headers and XMLHTTP Requests.
• Debug JavaScript, including the ability to set breakpoints and conditional breakpoints and line-at-a-time code execution. Additionally you can view JS stack traces broken down into the functions within the stack. Use tooltips to see the value of any variable within the JS, log function calls and profile the performance of the scripts. The improved JavaScript logging is amazing in its own right.
• Explore the DOM and edit as you go (including auto-complete) with handy JS code navigation.
• Vastly improved error handling and details.

This extension will actually reduce the need for several others you may have installed.

Posted in CSS, Firefox & Thunderbird, JavaScript & Tagged: CSS, firefox, JavaScript, web design, Web Development, XHTML

Unordered lists, discs, diamonds and you

An interesting little tidbit I picked up today whilst banging my head against my desk: when Firefox renders a page in Quirks mode, unordered lists that specify ‘disc’ as the bullet of choise are instead rendered with diamonds.

Posted in CSS, Firefox & Thunderbird & Tagged: CSS, firefox, Web Development

Selenium IDE Extension

Selenium IDE is a Firefox extension that is a “very easy to use and powerful tool for controlling, automating or testing web sites. If there is any repetitive or predictable task that you are always doing in your browser why not let the Selenium IDE handle it for you.”

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird, Quick Links, Ruby & Tagged: firefox, qa

Another Take: Firefox Extensions

Stuart Robertson of Design Meme has posted a concise write up of his Top 5 Firefox Extensions for Web Designers. I wasn’t aware of Aardvark, but it looks to be quite useful. The other two extensions that aren’t on my list of Firefox Extensions, are ones that I continue to monitor. Hell, the geek in me has happy little daydreams about each of ‘em.

GreaseMonkey has grown in popularity in a very short time, and while I like the idea of having the ability to script other sites, I just haven’t taken the time to install and play with it. I think it will be very addictive for someone like me…

I haven’t used del.icio.us for a couple of reasons. The first is the fact that I don’t like the idea of relying on an external entity to host my bookmarks. I need to spend some time researching the ability to sync my local bookmarks with del.icio.us. For now I keep my bookmarks synchronized using my own server. The second, reason is the same as the one I noted for GreaseMonkey. I think I would spend a lot of time tagging and tinkering.

Perhaps I will add these to my list o’ things to do on my holiday time off…

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird

FireFox Extensions - Updated

As it has been over a year since I initially posted my list of Firefox extensions, I think it is time for an update. I have added and removed many in that time, and while I can’t remember them all, here is my current list of active extensions for your perusal. I hope to keep this list up to date as I modify my usage, though I haven’t decided exactly how as of yet. Perhaps I will make use of InfoLister’s ability to upload the information, but I don’t know how I will be able to associate comments with each item. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Also, if you know of any killer extension please let me know as I would love to try ‘em out!

Firefox Extensions

Note 1: All of the links point to the home page for the extension which can be problematic at times. If you run into issues finding or installing an extension, you may want to search for that extension on the official Firefox extensions site.

Note 2: At the time of writing, several extensions have yet to be updated to be usable within Firefox 1.5. There are a couple of hacks that may solve this problem for some extenions, but some plugins will require updates to the core code.

General Web Browsing

• Adblock - Provides the ability to block advertisements - not just pop-ups, you can block the ads displayed in the middle of a news story too. The best part about it, is the fact that you can set up blocks using wild cards, so after some configuration, you discover that the vast majority of the sites you browse are now ad-free. As the blocking happens within your browser, the site still generates revenue from the ads, which is a nice bonus - well, for everyone but the advertisers I guess. This is a must have!
• SpellBound with the Mozilla SpellCheck Libraries - A straight forward, but feature-rich spell checker for form fields. Check out the screen shots to see it in action. A Must have for anyone who leaves comments, posts to forums or runs a blog!
• Google Toolbar - Adds a toolbar to Firefox, which provides the ability to search the currently viewed site, search word/phrase highlighting within the page, access to a cached copy of the page, the ability to navigate the directory tree, spell check and word translation.
• Bookmarks Synchronizer- Allows you to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple machines, even across operating systems. I have set it up to automatically synchronize my local bookmarks with a copy on my Web server each time I open and close Firefox, ensuring I have a backup. Sadly, the developer takes a while to update the extension after new releases, often forcing me to implement a hack. As of 1.5, the hacks don’t seem to work either.
• Nuke Anything Enhanced - While Adblock does an amazing job of removing adveritisements from a site, there are times when you really want to eliminate other pieces of a page. Enter Nuke Anything. Don’t want to see the sidebar, you can Nuke it. Want to be rid of the looping demo, but don’t want it included within Adblock? Nuke it.
• Forecastfox - Provides the current weather, forecasts, severe weather alerts and a lot of other weather-related information in a compact and unobtrusive package.
• InfoLister - The handy extension that made it possible for me to create this post so quickly. It generates a file with all of your installed extensions and themes, which makes upgrades of Firefox as well as moving to a new machine quite easy.
• IE View - A super simple, but very useful extension. IE View adds an item to the right-click menu which lets you open the current page in Internet Explorer. Some sites are poorly developed, and only work with Internet Explorer, so you can use this extension to quickly switch to IE for viewing. For those of us in Web development, it speeds up cross-browser.
• IE Tab - A new addition to my extension list, which provides similar functionality to IE View (above), though it opens Internet Explorer within a Firefox tab, instead of opening IE in a new window. This redundancy will most likely push one of these two extensions off of my list, but that will require some time to test the two.
• Tab Preview - “shows a preview of tab contents when you move your mouse over a background tab.” I’ve just installed it and will post an update after I’ve used it for a bit. It looks exciting though!

Web Development

• Web Developer - An amazing set of tools for Web developers. Indispensible for Web Developers.
• Image Zoom - Provides the ability to zoom in on an image within the Web page, saving the trouble of saving the image and opening it with a different application.
• ColorZilla - A handy color picker that sits in the status bar of the browser and provides an easy way to select a color from the page being viewed. Extremely useful for Web designers and developers.
• MeasureIt - Adds a ruler to the tools available within your browser. It also servers quite nicely as a straight-edge for those times when you aren’t quite sure if two borders are truly aligned, or one pixel off.
• SpellBound with the Mozilla SpellCheck Libraries - A straight forward, but feature-rich spell checker for form fields. Check out the screen shots to see it in action. A Must have for anyone who leaves comments, posts to forums or runs a blog!
• User Agent Switcher - Useful for Web development, and getting around sites that require a specific browser, this extension let’s you spoof the site into thinking you are using a different Web browser and/or operating system.
• IE View - A super simple, but very useful extension. IE View adds an item to the right-click menu which lets you open the current page in Internet Explorer. Some sites are poorly developed, and only work with Internet Explorer, so you can use this extension to quickly switch to IE for viewing. For those of us in Web development, it speeds up cross-browser.
• IE Tab - A new addition to my extension list, which provides similar functionality to IE View (above), though it opens Internet Explorer within a Firefox tab, instead of opening IE in a new window. This redundancy will most likely push one of these two extensions off of my list, but that will require some time to test the two.
• CookieCuller - Provides additional control of the cookies placed on your machine by Web sites.
• DOM Inspector (comes with Firefox - choose custom installation, and ensure ‘Developer Tools’ is checked) - Extremely helpful for Web developers

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird, Web Development

Tab Preview

Tab Preview “is an extension for Firefox 1.5 that shows a preview of tab contents when you move your mouse over a background tab.” I’ve just installed it and will post an update after I’ve used it for a bit. It looks exciting though!

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird

Modify Firefox 1.5 to work with all extensions

Scattered - Modify Firefox 1.5 to work with all extensions

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird, Quick Links, Web Development

Website testing with TestGen4Web and Firefox

Website testing with TestGen4Web and Firefox

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird, Quick Links, Web Development

Pasting Wrapped URLs into Firefox

Andrei Zmievski provides a quick bit of info regarding how to paste multi-line URLs into Firefox, which occur most often when a URL is wrapped in an e-mail. I need to make this change in my various Firefox installations. A bit more info, including a list of what the various settings mean, is provided on Jeremy Zawodny’s site.

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird

Thunderbird 1.0 Takes to the Skies

As reported on mozilla.org, Thunderbird 1.0 has been officially released! This is great news!

I expect I will be installing it on several family machines over the upcoming month. Why? Because it has been a solid e-mail client throughout its beta period, and has gotten easier to use with every release. It also provides a wealth of great features, including:

• Adaptive spam filters - “Thunderbird’s junk mail controls learn and improve from emails that you receive to stop spam.”
• “Saved search folders and search bar - To help you find emails faster you can save common searches in virtual folders and find emails with the search bar.”
• Extensions (just like Firefox)
• Simple migration from other e-mail clients
• Message grouping (I haven’t used this much, but plan to soon)
• Cross-platform support - You can use it on a Mac, PC or *Nix without any problem

Download your copy today!

Posted in Firefox & Thunderbird & Tagged: email, thunderbird