Firefox World Record

Were you one of the over 8 million people who downloaded Firefox 3 on Tuesday to help them break the World Record for most software downloads in a 24 hour period?

I’m not going to tell you you’re a dud if you’re still using Internet Explorer (there’s enough people saying that around the web), but I will say that I only switched to Firefox in the last few months and I’ve never looked back. It is faster, websites look better and it has heaps of in-built features and add-ons that make surfing the net much easier and more fun!

Kate commented on my Blog Re-design post the other day about how useful the Web Developer’s add-on in Firefox is for trying out colours and playing around with different tweaks in CSS. As soon as I read her comment, I realised I had left out an essential tool that I use all the time to work out how to change things in CSS. I haven’t really explored all that the Web Developer’s add-on can do, but I do use Firebug regularly to play around with CSS and to have a squizz at how other people have achieved the look they have on their blog.

Firebug displays the html, css and script of any website you are browsing. If you hover over the 6 digit code for a colour a little swatch pops up to show you which colour the code is for. the most useful feature of it that I find is that you can edit the css in firebug to give you a preview of how your changes will look. This little trick has gone a LONG way to helping me understand how CSS works because instead of taking a stab in the dark when editing the stylesheet and re-loading the page to see if the changes turned out the way you wanted, you can make changes in Firebug and see them instantly reflected on the webpage. If you are at all interested in learning about CSS, in my opinion, Firebug and Web Developers are the first things you should download.

In the spirit of all things Firefox, since they’ve just been setting world records and such, I thought I’d list the add-ons that I currently use and tell you which ones I love! I’m not going to link to all of them, because they can all be downloaded from the central depository at Firefox’s Add-on Site (and its even easier to find them with Firefox 3 - direct from your Tools menu).

• All-in-One Sidebar - puts your downloads, add-ons, bookmarks etc in a tabbed sidebar, making them all a bit more accessible
• Better Gmail 2 - adds features and skins to your Gmail
• Better Greader - same thing for Google Reader
• Colorzilla - this is another useful tool for playing with colour - an eyedropper that you can hover over any colour you see in your browser to find out the 6 digit and RGB value
• English (Australian) Dictionary - so it recognises “colour” and “favourite”!
• Firebug
• Fireshot - for taking screenshots (I actually use the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista for this, but if you’re not on that platform, then this works well)
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchroniser - I use a desktop and a laptop so this is an awesome tool - it keeps my bookmarks up to date on both machines
• Measure-it - drag and select any area in your browser to see its size in pixels - another useful blog tweaking tool
• Read it Later - I’ve only just installed this so I haven’t fully explored it yet, but with it you can save an offline version of a webpage to look at later

I do have a few more installed, but I don’t really use them, so can’t comment on their benefit.

So, tell me, do you use Firefox? What add-ons do you love and can I not live without!