It's difficult to imagine working on the web without Mozilla's Firefox and its bounty of fantastic, community-contributed add-ons. Everyone knows about Firebug and a myriad of other add-ons that have cut development and debugging time by huge percentages. But even if you aren't a coder, there are some fantastic, lesser-known add-ons that will that boost your productivity by leaps and bounds. Here are some of my favorites:
BBCodeXtra: WYSIWYG's generally suck and entering html markup into text fields is one of those mind-numbing tasks that can wreak havoc if you forget to close a tag. BBCodeXtra adds common HTML / XHTML tags to your right-click, freeing you to focus on your spelling and grammar.
Snap Links Plus: How many hours of your life have you lost right clicking on a list of links and opening them in new tabs? Snap Links Plus allows you to click and drag a box around a section of a page and then loads any selected links into new tabs or windows. Make sure you get version 1.1 here, not the experimental version listed under the add-ons portal, which wreaks havoc on your contextual menus.
Download Them All: Sometimes you just want to download a bunch of attachments and not the entire page. Sometime you need a quick copy of certain sections of a site and not the full monte. And in some cases, (we won't mention any names, Basecamp), you are prevented from getting a backup of your own assets. Download them all will allow you to customize and download exactly what you need, at the depth you need - and forgo the hour spent digging through customer flames on the support forum.
Menu Editor: Maybe your workflow would be a lot smoother if you had certain add-ons in right-click and others filed under Tools. Unfortunately, your add-ons have made that decision for you. Fear not! Menu Editor allows you to customize your menus so you have what you need, where you want it.
Total Validator: There's a ton of validator tools out there but this one is a one-stop shop: it validates HTML, accessibility, links and spell-checks. It provides a desktop app that works locally and integrates with the Firefox extension. Note: It currently doesn't run if your site has an Apache password on it. The developer is currently reworking the advanced version that allows for that.
When you have a moment, check out Mozilla's QA site, developed by Advomatic, and participate in improving Firefox.
Great post. I also love ColorZilla. It's tiny, and with a click it gives you a color eyedropper, color picker, and even page zoom. RGB Hex and more.
Dummy Lipsum is crucial when you need to quickly fill in node forms with placeholder text while testing.
We themers can't go a day without Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar for real-time visualization of HTML/CSS changes and bug zapping. But I will definitely be checking these out as well!
And if you need Firebug's featureset within IE, and the Web Dev Toolbar doesn't cut it, there's also Firebug Lite... which is a Javascript version of the Firefox add-on that can be used in any browser. A bit more effort to get it up and running than a Firefox add-on, but well worth it if you need to detangle an IE mess.
http://getfirebug.com/lite.html
A tip from Chris Shattuck's site: he uses the Stealthier add-on to "view my Drupal sites from an anonymous perspective without logging out or opening another browser." Sounds like a promising one for theming and Q/A. Testing now!