Circle Six on Firefox

The next post in this series will be about Internet applications for OS X, but first I wanted to focus on web browsing, and I have to admit that I’m very partial to Firefox. There are a few people that I highly respect that put their money on Safari and some of the great plugins available like Saft and Stand, but the sheer flexibility of Firefox makes it my favorite development tool. I’ve already gone over all the reasons I prefer to develop for Firefox first, so let’s get straight to my favorite plugins. Oh wait, first let me mention BonEcho. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a collection of machine-specific builds of Firefox optimized for G4, G5 and Intel Macs, so you can get the best possible performance out of Firefox. I’ve run into a few bugs on the Intel version, but I don’t know if it’s BonEcho or Firefox that’s crashing, so I’m not judging either at this point. Anyway, on with the show.

Showcase brings a variety of options for tab previews to Firefox. There are similar plugins available for Safari, and that’s what got me excited about this plugin to begin with. I prefer to use the sidebar version and turn off tabs when it’s loaded. It takes up some significant screen real estate, but I find it really handy when I’ve got a lot of sites open in tabs. Another handy tab-browsing plugin is Faviconize Tab, which lets you double click a tab to shrink it’s width down to just the favicon for the site.

Another aspect of Safari that was worth porting was the progress bar in the address bar. Fission provides this functionality and does it pretty well.

If you’re using Growl, and I can’t understand why you wouldn’t be, Growl Download Notification is a great little plugin that just sends a notification when a download completes. Simple, elegant, handy. Especially in combination with Download Statusbar, which gives you 2 ways to organize your downloads, both of which let you remove the need for the download window. I like the mini version which just places a small icon in my status bar, and when I click it, it pops up a vertical listing of current and completed downloads (the number shown is configurable). It has quite a few options and I definitely don’t miss the download window popping up or getting buried.

For web development I think I’ve mentioned two plugins too many times, but for the record here they are: Firebug and Web Developer are quite possibly the most important addons I have for Firefox. If you’re not familiar with them, do a little research and you’ll be blown away. Seriously. Another handy plugin is JSView, which gives you quick access to the various javascript and CSS files in a page. I use it mostly for getting a quick overview of what’s been loaded on a page in a dynamic site, although Firebug can do the same thing.

Live HTTP Headers is a good debugging tool, but once again, the combination of Firebug and Web Developer can accomplish similar tasks. It does provide some interesting feedback in certain circumstances though.

I keep hearing differing opinions on Google Browser Sync, but I use it religiously and love it. I browse on 3 different machines, Mac and PC, and GBS keeps my bookmarks, passwords and history available and synced at all times. If I leave a bunch of tabs open when I close my laptop, they’ll open when I sit down at my desktop. That’s really, really nice.

This is a short list. I try to keep my addons to a minimum at any given time and remove anything I’m not using regularly. There are plenty of top 10, top 20 even top 50 plugin lists on the web and I don’t think we need to go any further than this ;-).