9 Great Firefox Add-ons for Web Designers

On 06.04.10, In Web Design, by admin

9 Great Firefox Add-ons for Web Designers
The Firefox web browser, owned and developed by the Mozilla Project, is one of the most popular browsers online. You could say it’s the most popular, but that title still belongs to Internet Explorer, mainly because it comes installed by default on most PCs.

Firefox may not be the fastest browser around (although version 3.7 or 4 will probably change that), with Chrome and Opera 10.5 being a bit faster, but it sure is very stable and reliable. And with its very large collection of free add-ons, numbering over 3000, it is definitely the best choice for anyone.

There are add-ons for every purpose, from automation to task management, documents syncing and FTP clients. Web developers and designers are particularly lucky, as most of these add-ons can be used to make their work more effective and improve their results. Here are some of the best Firefox add-ons for web designers:

ColorSuckr. This add-on allows you to extract the most common 12 colors from any image and build a color scheme out of them. This is very useful when you want to build a website that conveys the same emotions and feeling from its colors as an image you liked. It’s hard to explain this, so you better check it out for yourself and use it in action.

ColorZilla. Colorzilla is the most popular and advanced color picker and eyedropper that millions of people downloaded and is used by thousands of designers in their everyday work. With Colorzilla, you can read a color from any part of your browser, adjust it to your liking and paste it into Photoshop or other editing program. You can save the most used colors in palettes, get information about DOM elements, measure the distance between any points on a page and do a lot of other great things.

Pallette Grabber. This is a relatively simple add-on that allows you to create a color pallette for Photoshop, GIMP or a host of other applications based on all the colors on the current page.

GridFox. GridFox is another simple, but very useful add-on that allows you to quickly verify if a web site follows a grid based layout by drawing a grid on top of any page you want.

Firebug. Firebug is the most popular Firefox add-on for web designers and developers (mainly for the latter, but designers can get a wealth of information, too). It allows the user to see a lot of information about a web page, including the code and how it was built, any kinds of tags and dependencies, CSS information and much more. You can also view, edit and debug HTML, Javascript and CSS code right in the browser, without using a third party utility.

Pixel Perfect. Pixel Perfect is a great add-on that integrates and works together with Firebug, giving you the ability to overlay any image over a web site. This is very useful for web designers and developers who are creating various mockups in Photoshop and want to see how they’ll change the site, if they are off by some measurements and what other things they can do to improve the design of a page.

MeasureIt. This is a very useful little extension that gives you the possibility to measure the pixel width and height of any element on a web page. Not only can you measure the sizes of the header, footer, sidebars, content section and other parts of a web site, but you can also easily see the size of any images. I used to do this by taking a screenshot of a web page, then pasting it in Photoshop, where I measured everything I needed, before I found this nifty tool.

Font Finder. An add-on that was created specifically for web designer and developers, Font Finder allows the user to view the information and analyze any font of any page element, copy any data he finds useful to the clipboard and perform real time inline replacements to test new design changes.

View Dependencies. This is a very useful tool for web designers, because it allows them to view all the files, images and other elements that are used to generate a page. It lists everything – all the internal and external links and the properties of the files. It integrates into Firefox by adding a new tab to the Page Info window.

The above add-ons are by far not the only ones, and if you need something more specific, you will most probably find it by searching the Mozilla add-ons database or Google (there are a lot of great add-ons that are not listed in the database).