It’s been a while since I did a tech post, so I thought I’d write about a few of the fun tech toys I’ve been playing with lately. Then I realized that most of these are Firefox add-ons, so I’ll make this a Firefox post. I’m a huge fan of this browser. It doesn’t have nearly the market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but I can’t imagine why. Besides being free and just being really good at what it does, one of the great strengths of Firefox is that there are dozens of wonderful add-ons available. In a previous post I talked about Zotero and LibX (the latter, to be fair, also works with IE). Here are a few more of my favorite Firefox accessories:
Tab Mix Plus
I don’t usually like add-ons that alter the basic functionality of the browser. These often involve “stupid browser tricks,” like enabling you to go back five pages at once if you simultaneously move the mouse toward the northwest, hold down the shift key, and sneeze. But there are a couple silly little things that I have often wished Firefox would do differently. I use their search box all the time and often forget to open a new tab before I use it, thereby losing what I had in the current tab. I have also often wished for some option that would let me re-open a tab that I accidentally closed. (Well, you can go to your history, but that’s too complicated.) Tab Mix Plus to the rescue. This lets you do both of the things I just mentioned, and oh so much more. I just installed this yesterday and now I have a “recently closed tabs” list under my history menu. I’ve also set it up so that search results open in a new tab. TMP also supports more esoteric features like tab merging, locking, and protecting. I’m still playing with this one. It seems that it may have slowed my page loading down a trifle, but it may be my imagination.
Delicious Bookmarks
If you’ve read the post referred to above, you know that I’m an enthusiastic user of Delicious, especially now that they have dispensed with that silly spelling. Firefox has an amazingly convenient add-on called Delicious Bookmarks that makes it possible to add items to your Delicious account with the click of a browser button. When installed, you get two new buttons on your Firefox toolbar. One takes you to your Delicious account, the other opens a window allowing you tag the current page. Or at least that’s how it used to work in the older version. The current version adds another button that opens your Delicious bookmarks in a side panel. The downside of the newer version is that it keeps trying to sync your Delicious bookmarks with your Firefox bookmarks. This makes no sense to me. I’ve always thought of Delicious as obviating the need for browser bookmarks, so I don’t use them at all. I certainly don’t want my hundreds of Delicious bookmarks showing up in a browser menu. Luckily, if you feel the same about these new features as I do, you can turn them off by going to Delicious→Switch to Classic Mode from the Firefox toolbar. There’s such a thing as too much integration.
ColorZilla
Have you ever tried to match colors with an existing web page? I mean when you can’t afford Photoshop? It can be a real pain. ColorZilla adds a tiny little eyedropper to the bottom left of your browser window. Click on the eyedropper and then mouse over any colored object on the page and you can see it’s color as RGB values and as hex. It will also tell you the positioning of the colored element and what tag is controlling the color. Right-click on the eyedropper and you get a number of other fun objects including a Photoshop-esque color-picking utility. Amazingly useful.
Firebug
Confession: I’m a lousy JavaScript programmer. I know it’s supposed to be a simple language, but I’ve always found it obtuse and frustrating. One of the reasons for this is that it is so hard to debug. In my experience, when a bit of JavaScript is not doing what I want it to, the result is nothing. I see a blank page in the browser and have no idea what the problem is. Enter Firebug. This add-on provides a JavaScript debugging environment as well as detailed information about the CSS properties and DOM hierarchy of a page. Tremendously useful.
Web Developer
This is in the same general class as Firebug and offers some of the same functionality. Web Developer installs a toolbar with a huge array of features that I’m not even going to begin to list here. One of my favorites is called “view generated source,” which lets you see the results of your server-side scripts as they are passed to the browser. Also exciting are the link checking and validation features and “display image dimensions.” I’m afraid that I may not be giving this wonderful tool its due by listing it as last in this enumeration of my favorite add-ons, so let me just say that I don’t know how I survived for so long without this: truly amazing.