A Firefox Add-on Coders Shouldn’t Be Without

From casual bloggers to advanced programmers, the Firebug add-on for Firefox is an essential tool to help you tweak your code. While viewing a web page you click on its button to bring up its display showing you the HTML, CSS and scripts.

One of the neat things about this add-on is that you can get a feel for how something is going to look on the page without actually editing the original file. Want to see what that headline will look like in a different color? With Firebug just change the CSS values and it immediately shows up in that color. Change the spacing, text, rollover values…do it with this add-on to see what you like before you make the changes to the files on your server.

And if you are feeling mischievous, you could go to a website, change the content, hide the Firebug window, and make it look like your changes exist for all the world to see. Maybe you could go to, I don’t know, CNN.com and change an article with a friend as the subject matter and ask them how they got in the news. Again, you’re not actually changing the content, just the cached files you’ve already downloaded. This is not a hacking tool.

Hunting for the exact line of text that you want to change may be a little difficult depending on the complexity of the site you’re viewing at the time. But once you find what you’re looking for, it can really save you time by not having to change your files, uploading them to the server and refreshing, and repeating the process until you’re satisfied.

[tags]firefox,add-ons,extension,firebug[/tags]

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