Most Firefox users download different kind of extensions (plugin/add-ons) for certain purpose. Just name the purpose: Social Networking, RSS readers, Mail Notifier, Bookmarking, Downloading, Chatting, and many more. I bet you ~as a firefox user, and if you aren’t, quickly join us)~ are confused to choose which extensions is suited for your needs. You should know the pros and cons of every extension as they weren’t created by Gods. You can’t just stumble all the extensions to your Firefox because it will decrease the performance (I won’t run a browser which make me wait 2 minutes to open a new window). Thus, you need to search for other’s opinion regarding the best extensions for different occasions.

Well, here’s my review of Firefox extensions which related to web designing:

Web Developer

This is the must have tools that web designers should have. You can view a web page and edit it at the same time. It’s a very good tool to evaluate your own website, and to take a peek at other people’s work. I wanted to make a detailed review about this extension, but Six Revisions already listed their 9 Practical Ways to enhance this tool.

Fire FTP

A powerful, less bugg, FTP application. Manage your account to upload websites in simple steps. Easy to configure and use, as easy as click and drag. Linux’s site is featuring this extension in one of their post. Why bother using dedicated FTP client while you can do it from your own browser?

NewsFox

An RSS Reader inside a browser will make you spend lesser time from switching applications. I know that most of modern browser will include their own RSS Reader. Even Firefox already have LiveBookmark. However, NewsFox can manage your RSS Feeds neatly. It’s quite shame that they don’t have the search feature for those feeds. I personally subscribed 50 RSS feeds and will keep growing, because more and more well designed websites are featured each days. How to use? Simply add the feed you are going t read, check the feed, and refresh the feed so that it can retrieve updates from the site. Since I have many feeds to read every day, I often categorized all the feeds. Every Friday I look for new websites in Designsnack from their feed and use the following extension to make a snapshot:

ScreenGrab

As a designer, you can’t always rely on your own work to get inspiration. Try looking at others’ websites and see their layout combinations. Sometimes if my sense of color harmony is not right, I browse on my snapshot collections to choose on which website’s color I can follow on. You can take a snapshot of the whole site, part of the site’s frame, or only their visible portion.

A little bit off-topic, here:
This post is my first post after more than 2 weeks. Those are rough weeks as I am beginning to work at a news company (still designing website). The situation is quite hectic here. I am moving to the capital (Jakarta) with my good ol’ motorcycle in the intense raining season. It’s a though situation, but I’m manage to get used to it.

One more thing to cover, this entry was presented for Jacob Cass’ Graphic Design Writing Group Project. It’s a good start for a newbie like me to involve in design competitions (even though it was lottery based).

Tags: addon, Design, extension, firefox, FireFTP, NewsFox, ScreenGrab, WebDeveloper, Website

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