Have you ever wanted to create a web page that’s easy on the eyes? You’d think it would be simple, but there’s actually a lot of work behind creating a site that looks good.
We’ve got the tools you need to create a beautiful website, no matter what your level of expertise. We have templates that are ready to go and customizable, so you can make sure your website is exactly how you want it.
We also offer training courses for those who want more information about how to design sites and what goes into making them look great.
Firefox Web Design Tools
Mozilla Firefox browser is probably one of the most popular browsers among developers. The open-source browser has approximately 250 million monthly users, according to TechCrunch, and offers an enhanced level of browser privacy compared with others like Google Chrome.
Privacy and data transparency are a huge selling point for a large part of the tech world, so it’s no surprise Mozilla Firefox has risen to the top. And with functionality matching that of Chrome, the browser has a lot to offer for web development.
In this article, I want to share some of the most popular Firefox developer tools that will hopefully improve your productivity, privacy and flexibility when browsing the world wide web!
Firefox Developer Edition
firefox dev edition
For the Firefox newbies, make sure you have the right Mozilla browser. As far as I know, Mozilla offers two browsers. These are compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux and are available in over 90 languages. There’s the normal browser and then the Developer Edition — which is the one you (a developer) should install.
I don’t want to go into a whole comparison between the two browsers, all you need to know is the Firefox Developer Edition browser was created specifically for developers with preferences tuned specifically for web developers and built-in dev tools.
Once the Firefox download is complete and you’ve got it running on your PC, the next step is to find some handy extensions to add to your toolbar.
…
- Ghostery
Ghostery
Ghostery is essentially an ad blocker for websites. You might be wondering why you need an adblocker if Firefox has such good privacy settings. Well, while Firefox blocks tracking you’ll still see generic ads displaying when browsing web pages.
Install the Ghostery tool to eliminate that marketing clutter. As a bonus, the blocking feature speeds up page loads and optimizes page performance by automatically blocking and unblocking trackers to meet page quality criteria.
Beyond blocking ads you’ll be able to enjoy enhanced anti-tracking features that ensure your data is protected and anonymised. This extension comes highly rated and recommended by the Mozilla team so you know you can expect the highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience.
- AdBlocker Ultimate
adblocker ultimate
A good alternative to Ghostery is AdBlocker Ultimate. This extension has one purpose: remove ALL ads. It doesn’t matter if they are whitelisted, ethical or even vegan, this extension will wipe them from your web pages.
Similar to Ghostery, the blocking features will speed up your browsing. And since a lot of websites will restrict your access if they sense an AdBlocker, you can easily accept ads on trusted websites to enter.
It’s a free extension, and one of the highest-rated Firefox add-ons, so definitely a good pick. Plus if you preferred this adblocker you can install it on almost every major browser.
- uBlock Origin
Of all the privacy developer tools, uBlock has by far the most users. It’s described as a wide-spectrum content blocker that’s easy on CPU and memory and NOT an ad blocker.
Out of the box, these list filters are loaded and enforced: EasyList (ads), Peter Lowe’s Ad server list (ads and tracking), EasyPrivacy (tracking), Malware domains.
- NoScript Security Suite
NoScript Security Suite is a security developer tool. It provides protection on the web, with preemptive actions to prevent the exploitation of security vulnerabilities. So you’ll enjoy an all-around safer browsing experience as you delve into the depths of the internet.
Specifically, it protects your “trust boundaries” against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), cross-zone DNS rebinding / CSRF attacks (router hacking) and Clickjacking attempts, thanks to its unique ClearClick technology.
I guess you won’t know until you know, right? Hackers seem to be lurking everywhere these days so better safe than sorry. Load this tool up and worry less. Also available for your Tor browser 😉
- HTTPS Everywhere
HTTP everywhere
This is another security tool for when you’re browsing the web. HTTPS Everywhere makes sure URLs and follow links are encrypted automatically with HTTPS encryption.
Most sites support HTTPS but don’t put it to use. Instead, they may default to unencrypted HTTP or have unencrypted links embedded in the page. So for an extra layer of security, you can install this tool to make sure all web pages are encrypted. This developer tool is also available on Chrome and Opera.
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
duckduckgo
DuckDuckGo has always been strong on privacy and data protection. You might already be using their search engine (a good alternative to Google). Well, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is more of the same.
With this Firefox tool, you can take control of your personal information wherever you are on the internet. What you get is a handy little tool that blocks tracking, provides encryption and, within the tool dropdown, you can even search using the DuckDuckGo search engine.
You don’t need to configure anything or customise the settings, it’s really user friendly that way. Also once installed, your preferred search engine will become DuckDuckGo. Hope that’s not a problem.
- Stylus
stylus
Want to give your website a facelift? Let me introduce Stylus. It’s an easy way to redesign your favourite websites. You can install custom themes or create and edit your own personalised CSS stylesheets.
You can get this tool for free as it’s open-source. Plus, if you’re not an English speaker, there are options for a few different languages. Stylus doesn’t care about your data and so collects nothing.
- Clear Browsing Data
clear browsing data
We all know how to erase our browsing history but can we do it with a single click? With Clear Browsing Data that dream becomes a reality. You can quickly clear cookies, history and cache with a single click to your toolbar.
Here’s a list of all the data that can be cleared using this developer tool: Cookies, Browsing history, Cached images and files, Autofill form data, Download history, Service Workers, Plugin Data, Saved passwords, IndexedDB data, and Local storage data
The extension supports some customisation, you can clear everything or just selected data types to clear. Clear Browsing Data is also available for Chrome and Edge.
- Clear Cache
The premise of this developer tool is that you press F9 and your browser cache is cleared. I’m wondering why they didn’t just call it F9?! I guess Clear Cache is a bit more search-friendly.
And that’s it! It clears your cache. You can activate it using the dropdown or press F9…
- Measure-it
mearsure it
Measure what? Anything on your webpage. There’s nothing more to this developer tool than that. Once it’s activated you can select whatever area you want to measure and the tool will display width and height.
It’s probably not one of those tools you need all the time, but there will be moments when you’ll be glad to have it in your toolbox.
- Cookie Quick Manager
cookie manager
This is your go-to Cookie manager. With the Cookie Quick Manager you can view, edit, create, delete, backup and restore cookies.
Developers and testers will enjoy Cookie Quick Manager as it further supports contextual identities such as Private Browsing, First-party isolation and SameSite flag.
- FoxyProxy Standard
foxy proxy
FoxyProxy Standard is a proxy management tool that you’ll want to have for advanced proxy capabilities. Basically, with this developer tool, you can automatically switch internet connections across one or more proxy servers.
The Firefox browser has this capability within its Connection Settings dialogue, but it’s a manual process. With FoxyProxy you can automate the whole thing.
FoxyProxy Standard is the most advanced management tool with more advanced configuration options. For a more basic proxy tool try FoxyProxy Basic which is an on/off proxy switcher.
- Bitwarden – Free Password Manager
bitwarden
Bitwarden is a free password manager tool similar to LastPass. There are two main reasons that Bitwarden is the go-to password manager on the Firefox browser. One, it’s very highly rated. Two, it’s free for personal use.
If you’re unfamiliar with password managers, I’ll run you through it. Basically, whenever you log into a portal using your browser, Bitwarden saves your login details (after asking for your permission). This means all your passwords will be in one secure place.
With a master password, you can log in to Bitwarden from any device and manage your passwords. What’s really handy about this tool is that you can share your credentials with others and give them access to all the login details as well (for teamwork and stuff). Adding others to the tool comes at an extra cost per person, you can check out the fees here.
- Wappalyzer
wappalyzer developer tool
I mentioned Wappalyzer in my other article 14 Best Chrome Developer Tools 2021. And I’ll mention it again here, just because it’s a cool developer tool to add to your toolbox.
With Wappalyzer you can quickly see what technologies a website is using. Click the icon and it’ll drop down to show you which JavaScript libraries the site is using as well as the e-commerce platform, the CMS, Analytics, frameworks, PaaS and a bunch of other web info.
This is a free add-on. You don’t have to pass on any login details. That being said, there’s a pro version that is paid but I think it’s only for those who really want to dive into the finer details of each website.
- Translate Web Pages
translate
This add-on is a blessing if you visit sites in different languages. Translate Web Pages will translate pages in real-time so you can read and understand the content in your prefered language.
The add-on uses Google or Yandex (which is like the Russian Google) to translate page materials without any copy and paste bullshit. You’ll find all major languages available, so you’ll be able to understand what’s going on no matter what corner of the world you find yourself in.
None of your browsing info is collected when using this tool but the content of the web page is sent to either Google or Yandex servers. To be honest this is my first time hearing about Yandex so I don’t really know which is better…
- Grammarly for Firefox
grammarly
While this isn’t necessarily a developer tool, it’ll help with your written communication — which is a big part of any digital job. Grammarly helps correct spelling errors and, if you want, the advanced features will help you improve your clarity, tone and sentence structure.
Once installed it’ll provide real-time feedback in all your main apps — I find it super helpful for Gmail and Twitter two places you don’t want to make a spelling mistake. Signup is free for the basic version.
- Feedbro
rss
If you’re an avid reader like myself, then it’s often time-consuming visiting all your favourite sites to stay updated with the latest posts. Feedbro lets you aggregate various sources into your personalised feed.
There’s a lot of functionality with this tool that you can explore later. What’s important is that you can easily add any new website you visit with the extension and continue browsing.
- ColorZilla
colour picker
At some point in your adult life, you’ll need to figure out the exact colour values on a webpage. Of course, you could spend ten seconds examining the code but I know a quicker way. The ColorZilla add-on. It takes about two seconds to identify a colour value and paste it into another program.
You’ll be able to see the RGB values and the hex values and even access your history with the tool which is handy if you can’t recall that webpage you were admiring. If you want to learn more about this tool’s features click here.
- Easy Screenshot
See something you like and want to capture it in 4k? Well, this is the tool for you. With Easy Screenshot you’ll be able to quickly capture a screenshot of the whole webpage. (I don’t think it actually saves in 4k… That was just a joke).
Anyway, it’s a great tool for documenting bugs and other fun stuff. This tool serves a singular function, so if you want something that’s a little more flexible I suggest the Lightshot Screenshot app for the desktop. It’s free and works across all applications with handy editing capabilities.
Bonus: Laser Cat
laser cat
Sometimes we just need a moment to kick back and shoot lasers at things on the internet, right? Feeling tired? Shoot lasers. Feeling frustrated? shoot a laser. Want to relax? That’s right, shoot some cat lasers.
chrome developer tools
If you’re building web applications today, there’s no escaping Google Chrome. It’s one of the most popular browsers in use today and an important environment for developers to test out their code and applications.
While Chrome has a set of developer tools called Chrome DevTools built directly into the browser, there are many features it lacks. For example, it can be difficult to measure site performance and easily debug front-end code that emphasizes state management.
CHROME EXTENSIONS FOR DEVELOPERS
CSSViewer
ColorZilla
GoFullPage
Redux DevTools
Angular DevTools
React Developer Tools
JSON Formatter
EditThisCookie
Postman Interceptor
SAML Chrome Panel
Lighthouse
Alexa Traffic Rank
Checkbot
Luckily, third-party developers — and some Google engineers — have built plenty of Chrome extensions to help with different aspects of development and testing. Some extensions can help developers debug tricky front-end styling issues and others can assist with performance and security testing in the browser.
Below are just some of the Chrome browser extensions that can level up your web application development process.
CSS and Styling Extensions
In front-end design, everything a developer writes gets filtered through the browser a person is using. Even if your code seems logical, that doesn’t guarantee it will look as you expect in a live application. That’s why it’s important for developers to test how their code looks in a browser.
CSS, one of the main aspects of styling web applications, is also notoriously tricky. Styling sheets can be long and complex, with different lines of code frequently overwriting each other based on the rules of the hierarchy of CSS code. It’s often hard to tell what the final result will look like just by reading the code.
Because it’s so hard to get right, a lot of testing happens on the front end. These Chrome extensions can help testers and developers see what’s happening in their code and how it looks in the browser. In turn, that can help them communicate more effectively and spot any bugs that turn up.
CSSViewer Chrome Developer Tools
Image: CSSViewer
CSSVIEWER
This tool is for any front-end developer who has ever wished they knew how a cool-looking website was put together. If you want to emulate a certain design — or if you just can’t figure out why your styling code will not look the way you want it to look — CSSViewer gives users a complete summary of the applied CSS attributes and values. It’s simple to use — just hover over an element you want to inspect, and the styling attributes used to create the element will appear.
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Colorzilla screenshot
Image: ColorZilla
COLORZILLA
Trying to get colors to match can be a pain. Fortunately, this tool saves time that you would have spent hunting through code to find the matching color. Developers can use ColorZilla as an eyedropper tool by pointing a cursor at any part of a webpage to get its color encoding. It also has a convenient color-picker tool that lets users choose a shade from a color wheel to get the code for that color. It also saves a history of your most recently used colors so you don’t have to keep doing the same thing over again.
GoFullPage screenshot
Image: GoFullPage
GOFULLPAGE
One annoying aspect of debugging front-end styling issues is trying to communicate the problem clearly. This is especially difficult if different engineers are responsible for bug reporting and bug fixes. Because so much of styling is visual, testers rely heavily on taking screenshots of issues they want to discuss. GoFullPage solves the problem of taking multiple screenshots to capture a large element by allowing users to take a single snapshot of an entire webpage. It also doesn’t hurt that the extension is simple to use with just one click.
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JavaScript Development Extensions
There’s really nothing quite like JavaScript development. It’s the main language used for front-end development, but it can be a lot to wrap your head around. It doesn’t follow many of the rules of other programming languages and it’s constantly evolving, taking on new features as developers build different frameworks to optimize different styles of coding.
As a result, JavaScript code can easily become unruly, and even the frameworks built to bring order to the chaos can be difficult to navigate.
That’s only become more pronounced as recent JavaScript frameworks emphasize state management, which is how different user interface components store information about users and actions. Applications have moved toward architectures that handle much of the decision-making on the front end rather than on the server. This creates a smoother user experience, but it also makes JavaScript code more complex and harder to untangle. Developers have to keep track of the state of the user experience at every point.
Thankfully, there are a few Chrome extensions developers can use when testing their JavaScript code to make following the flow of execution a little easier.
Redux Devtools screenshot
Image: Redux DevTools
REDUX DEVTOOLS
Redux is a JavaScript library that helps developers manage state in their code. Developers who rely on Redux can use this extension to easily see the state of their web application at every point in time. Redux DevTools displays the global state of the application and lets developers drill down to look into every object. There is also a corresponding actions list that tracks all actions that have occurred, so developers can see how actions and the state are interacting.
Angular Devtools screenshot
Image: Angular DevTools
ANGULAR DEVTOOLS
This extension was developed by Google, which also built the popular Angular framework for JavaScript development. Angular DevTools is easy to use and, crucially, doesn’t clutter up the browser window. Instead, it integrates into the existing Chrome DevTools as a new tab specifically for Angular. Using this tool, developers can inspect the states of elements and also examine performance and speed. The extension makes it much easier to follow the flow of the code and see whether everything is behaving as expected at each step.
React Developer Tools screenshot
Image: React Developer Tools
REACT DEVELOPER TOOLS
This Chrome extension is similar to the Angular DevTools extension, except it caters to the React JavaScript framework instead. There is a tree of React components, which developers can drill down into and see further properties of the components. It features actions like logging components to the console and tracking state changes as you interact with the website to help with debugging. Contained within two additional tabs in Chrome developer tools, the extension also avoids cluttering your desktop.
Back-End Developer Chrome Extensions
A browser may not seem like the most direct place to deal with the back-end development process, but back-end code often interacts with a browser to do things like exchange information and handle requests and responses.
Data can take a lot of different forms and can also be saved into many different places, both on the front end and the back end. When data isn’t formatted correctly or when input doesn’t contain the information expected, the code can perform incorrectly. But parsing through data can get messy. That’s why having a few useful Chrome extensions can make aspects of debugging these interactions easier to manage.
Json Formatter screenshot
Image: JSON Formatter
JSON FORMATTER
Often when you get JSON data, it is extremely hard to read. It may work fine with the code, but due to spacing issues, people will have a hard time making any sense of it. That can be a problem when there’s a bug and developers have to dive into JSON data to check the values. JSON Formatter allows developers to view JSON data directly in the browser in a readable format. It displays the JSON tree and allows users to drill down and collapse any components to make it easier to read.
EditThisCookie screenshot
Image: EditThisCookie
EDITTHISCOOKIE
Anyone who has dealt with cookies knows how complicated they can be, and debugging issues with cookies can be doubly difficult because they store detailed information used for authentication. Even though Chrome DevTools has features that make it easy to view and delete cookies, it doesn’t offer many configurations.
EditThisCookie allows developers to edit the content of cookies, giving them more room to test different scenarios and check for logic holes in the code. It also makes it easy to add and create cookies, and includes features like blocking and importing or exporting cookies into files.
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Postman screenshot
Image: Postman Interceptor
POSTMAN INTERCEPTOR
Postman is a popular application for testing API calls, and this Chrome extension version makes the tool even easier to use. Developers can capture requests in the browser and observe how they’re formatted, then use the data to format their API calls and check that the data they send looks correct. Developers can also filter requests by type, such as only capturing POST or GET calls.
SAML Chrome Panel screenshot
Image: SAML Chrome Panel
SAML CHROME PANEL
As one of the major authentication standards, SAML can get pretty overwhelming, with several configurations and options for different types of authentication flows. This extension captures network traffic and highlights SAML requests and responses, then lets the developer drill down into the SAML messages. The tool can be used directly in the Chrome developer tools and has formatted SAML messages for easy viewing.
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Performance Testing Chrome Extensions
If a mobile site takes over three seconds to load, most users navigate away. That’s why it’s so important for developers to do performance testing throughout the software development process and not just at the end when all the code has been written. Performance issues can sometimes indicate a larger architectural problem that requires work to redo. When those problems are caught early on, the fixes are a lot easier and quicker.
Developers can take advantage of Chrome extensions to help with performance testing in the browser. Some of these tools allow developers to get metrics on how well their websites perform compared to other website norms and alert them to specific concerns like slow load times, accessibility issues or security vulnerabilities. Other tools help developers understand how their website performs on search engine optimization.
Lighthouse screenshot
Image: Lighthouse
LIGHTHOUSE
Another Chrome extension developed by Google, Lighthouse helps developers audit their websites. It checks whether your application can be easily used as a progressive web app — an application that users can bookmark by creating a shortcut on their desktop or mobile homepage, much like a native app. The extension also gives feedback on accessibility concerns, like whether texts and background colors have good contrast. There’s also a suite of performance metrics, broken down into subcategories, like how long it takes for the first items to load on a page and how long it takes for the page to become interactive.
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Alexa Traffic Rank screenshot
Image: Alexa Traffic Rank
ALEXA TRAFFIC RANK
This extension is handy for developers who care a lot about SEO. It provides a short summary of the Amazon Alexa search ranking for any website and displays other facts about the website, like how many other sites link to your web page and examples of sites that have similar search traffic. It even provides developers with words that are closely associated with the search traffic for the given site. Developers can use the tool to improve their website’s SEO.
Checkbot screenshot
Image: Checkbot
CHECKBOT
This extension tests SEO, performance and also website security. It gives feedback on changes that could improve metrics for each of the categories in a comprehensive report — for example, improving broken links and ALT tags on images and redesigning pages to display better on mobile in order to improve SEO rankings. When it comes to performance, the extension might suggest steps like using minification and cutting down on excessive API redirects. Checkbot also looks for security holes, like whether the site is using secure headers and whether insecure tools are included in the application.
Conclusion
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