Blog Flak

Checking my site stats lately has been a bit suprising in a number of ways but the biggest one is how many people are now using Firefox for their browser. The past couple years I’ve noticed a slow but steady gain when it was just a trickle to start with. Now it seems suddenly that nearly 50% of the visitors to my sites are using the alternative browser. I like Firefox quite a lot and I use it about half and half with IE on a daily basis.

As a web developer and site designer I can’t just use one or the other, site appearance and optimization demands that I use both, usually at the same time to view and edit pages. Often I’ll have both my main machines that are sitting side by side open to the same pages that I’m editing and using a different browser on each with different screen resolutions. By far though my favorite thing about Firefox is the Web Developers tool bar that can be added on as an extension. With it you can outline tables and block level page elements to visualize how different sections of a web page are interacting. It also has a built in pixel ruler that can give you length and height measurements directly on any web page and even call out dimensions of a box or rectangle shape on screen.

It also has a number of other very nice functions built in for viewing a number of hidden details about pages, site validation right from the tool bar, site loading speed and tons more. Another very cool extension is the color picker. You can get hex codes and color triplets with an eye dropper right off of any section on any web page including all the images. Tres cool!

IE also has a web developer tool bar that can be downloaded from MS but it doesn’t have near the functionality as the one for Firefox.

Get your Firefox web developer tool bar right here…

Technorati tags: tool bar, Firefox, web design, web developer, extensions, mozilla, Internet Explorer