I installed the Web Developer extension in my web browser this evening. If you do any web development work, or even just browse the web, you really need to check out this tool’s features. It works with Firefox, Flock, and Mozilla web browsers.
Some of the features/uses that I’m stoked about:
- Viewing the exact CSS styles being applied to a particular element (CSS/View Style Information, then select an element with the pointer). If you’ve ever had trouble with the “cascade” in CSS, you’ll know how valuable this could be!
- Being able to see the anchors in a page without having to read the page source (Information/Display Anchors).
- Hilighting links without title attributes (Outline/Outline Links Without Title Attributes) to identify the links without “balloon help”.
- Resizing the browser window to 800×600 (Resize/800×600) to verify viewability of a page on older displays.
I could go on and on. It seems like there are about 100 menu items in this package, and almost every one of them looks immediately useful to me!
I’m using Firefox 1.5 on Mac OSX 10.4, and I ran into a little trouble installing the software. When I first tried to download/install the tool I got the following error:
Software installation is currently disabled. Click Edit Options… to enable it and try again.
across the top of the page. The “Edit Options…” button probably opens the correct dialog/tab under Windows, but the OSX version of Firefox doesn’t seem to have an “Enable software installation” button. After reading Firefox help and searching the web, I finally read the Troubleshooting section of the installation instructions where it tells you how to enable software installation. (Duh!)
