Add-In and Add-On, Why Doncha?

Things are getting better out there. Browsers today are still not fully in agreement as to how any particular page should look, but it’s a whole lot better than it was. I think we all owe a tremendous debt to the Firefox people at Mozilla. They have done more than anyone else to shame Microsoft into fixing their Internet Explorer, who had more to fix than anyone. IE’s still not perfect, but it’s much better than it was. And that’s upped the game for everyone.

There was a Web Standards Group who railed against substandard browsers, but they never did a particularly good job of explaining who they were, how to join them, or why anyone would want to listen. For a time they maintained a redirect page you could send people to that encouraged people to upgrade their Web browsers, but they grew timid and withdrew from that. The guys from A List Apart drew a line in the sand back at Issue 99 and said “No More!” and started making a lot of noise about how Things Should Be Better Than This By Now. That was great and it did a lot to bring a brighter light to The Cause. But Mozilla actually went about solving the problem by creating a wonderful browser with features people had been asking for that, wait for it, actually worked! And they gave it away for free.

One of the best things Mozilla did, early on, was to realize that they could not think of everything, and that they could not provide everything, that the market might want. It seems self evident, now. Nobody could imagine the Two Steves trying to write all of the programs that would ever run on the Apple II, or on the Macintosh. A big reason the Apple iPhone is so popular is not because the audio is so much better than any other telephone or that the AT&T plan is just so much better than what you can get from Verizon--it’s a wildly popular telephone because everything on it works and, “There’s an App for that!”

Mozilla Firefox has terrific support for add-ons. These range from very simple to incredibly complex. They span the range from whimsy to serious research. As you might imagine, there is a pretty comprehensive collection of Web Developer tools available at a click that will help to make your page-building better, faster and easier.

CodeBurner is an extended reference for anyone working HTML and CSS. Originally, this was itself an add-on to the Firebug extension, but now it is available as a standalone tool. Very nice, though you may prefer the books and documentation that ships with every copy of Dreamweaver (Window => Results => Reference leads you to the O’Reilly library of reference materials for HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and more ).

One of my favorite extensions is HTML Validator. It generates a continuously updated report in the bottom status bar of Firefox, showing the number of validation errors found on the page you are viewing almost instantly. Click on this number and the Page Source displays, with the errors highlighted. From the Firefox add-on site, there is a warning saying that there is no Mac OSX version, but if you visit the developer’s Web site, you can download a Macintosh version there. It’s the one I depend upon, every day.

Chris Pederick’s wonderful Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar full of tools you probably didn’t even know you needed. Toggle CSS on or off. Quickly re-size your browser to approximate various screen resolutions. Outline block-level elements, or deprecated elements you are still using on your pages. Disable JavaScript, Images or even Cookies on a page to see how each affects the outcome. Even validate your markup or code. It’s a nice piece of work, and so far Chris only suggests that you pay him for his efforts.

The charmingly-named ColorSuckr is not a color picker tool (there are several of those, too, though). ColorSuckr studies an image and then suggest the dozen colors represented in that image that would look best when used on your page. Kind of nice.

There are extensions entirely devoted to JavaScript, the DOM and all of those Black Arts. Similarly, there are downloads catering to the PHP developer, or ASP developer, who wants all of his or her tools in one place.

I’m finding more and more that I develop in Firefox, now, and merely check my pages in other browsers. Try a few extensions out this week, and you might begin to work that way, too.