Firefox Usage

Extensions

• Firebug: Unfortunately the key shortcuts cannot be customized it seems. It is an excellent extensions when debugging JavaScript code.

• Web Developer Toolbar: You can configure this add-on to open a page's source in a tab instead of a window, very useful! Plus you can configure it to open the pages in your favorite editor, but it does not accept command-line argument so you must write a wrapper. You can change the keys shortcuts.

• LiveHTTPHeaders: Extremely useful when you need to analyze what's happening between the browser and the server.

• ColorZilla: Includes an excellent color picker for web design. Unfortunately does not work on 64-bit platforms. Update: does not seem to work anymore even on 32-bit, and latest version (beta 2) prevents Firebug from working.

• HTML Validator: Can be used to see quickly if your pages are W3C compliant. Currently renders Firefox 2.0.0.11 completely unusable.

• Total Validator: Another tool to check page compliance, seems to work better.

• Rubyfox: Nice theme to relook Firefox.

Web Development

• A really annoying bug seems to be that Firebug / Firefox error console is not able to catch errors present in Prototype Ajax callbacks. Opera has the same problems. When using normal hand-coded Ajax calls, errors are caught but there still seems to be problems. See this bug.

• If Firebug starts behaving strangely (not logging JS errors in the console). reinstalling it after uninstalling it may help.
• UPDATE: a much better way is to look into prefs.js (in the profile directory) and see if the FB keys seem normal. In my case there was a key set to false which was preventing the logging of JS errors in the console.