Grab a copy of the excellent Web Developer Toolbar (if you don’t have it already – reviewed here) extension for Firefox.  On the far left-hand side you will find the ‘Disable’ menu.  The top option will be ‘Disable Cache’.  Tick that option and away you go – cache turned off!

1. Web Developer Toolbar

“The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.”

The Web Developer Toolbar is the de-facto standard for web developers and a absolute must have. It provides an array of useful tools to help with development. Some of my favourite features include:

• Edit CSS live and see the results instantly or add an additional style sheet.
• View ‘Generated’ source to see the result of DOM manipulation with JavaScript
• Outline any element on the page to see its extent, either by tag name or by hovering with the mouse.
• View detailed cookie information and edit it on the fly.
• View details form information, enable disabled inputs, convert POST <-> GET and more. This is very useful for security testing.
• Submit the current page to the W3C HTML validator with a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+A or Cmd+Shift+A on Mac)

There are many, many other tools to discover and I highly recommend you download it and try for yourself.

iZone Rating: 5/5

2. Firebug

“Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.”

Firebug is the 2nd most important tool available to web developers. With Firebug installed, you can edit a pages HTML live, get detailed DOM and JavaScript error information and view CSS inheritance and box model details.

With AJAX becoming a standard development technique, detailed JavaScript debugging is incredibly useful and being able to edit HTML live makes debugging and correcting design errors much easier.

iZone Rating: 5/5

3. YSlow

“YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites.”

Developed by Yahoo!, the YSlow addon works in conjunction with Firebug to analyze a web page and identify performance bottlenecks. YSlow provides a rating, A to F, for a range of issues including: HTTP requests, duplicate scripts, inline CSS/JavaScript, DNS lookups and caching. Each of these ratings are then linked to advisories with explanations and suggestions for improvements.

In addition to the performance ratings, YSlow also gives you a detailed breakdown of all the media and external files called by your page. You can use the size and download time to identify files that could potentially be optimised.

With page load time soon to be a factor in Google’s Landing Page Quality Score for AdWord’s, developers should be paying more attention to optimising pages for quicker response times. This extension will make that process much easier.

iZone Rating: 4/5

4. ColorZilla

“With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.”

Like a colour on a web page or in an image? Want to know the hex value? Colorzilla makes this incredibly easy by adding an eye-dropper to the browser window.

iZone Rating: 4/5

5. MeasureIt

“Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.”

A very useful extension during the early stages of layout development. No longer will you have to take a screenshot and paste it into Photoshop to measure how wide or high an element should be, now you can just click on the ruler and measure away.

iZone Rating: 3/5

In this series of posts I will explore my favourite Firefox add-ons and extensions. In this, the first in the series, I’ll tell you which addons I use to enhance my daily web browsing experience, including: blocking adverts, improving usability and defending myself from phishing. In later posts, I’ll cover my top Web Development extensions, the best Search Engine Optimisation plugins and Social Networking toolbars.

1. AdBlock Plus

“Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.”

AdBlock Plus looks at all the images, flash movies and iFrames on a web page, applies a set of rules to filter out objects that look like adverts and leaves you with a clean, fast loading web page. This is a ‘must have’ extension and is the first one I install on a new Firefox installation.

AdBlock Plus provides two methods to improve and update the ruleset. You can manually add new rules yourself to filter out any adverts that slip through the net and you can subscribe to additional filtersets.

iZone Rating: 5/5

2. NewTabURL

The NewTabURL extension allows you to customise the URL that is opened when a new tab is opened, you can choose from: a blank page, your home page, duplicate the current page or enter a custom URL. This is a useful feature, but for me, the most compelling reason to install this extension is a secondary function: when you have a URL on the clipboard, clicking the new tab button will open a tab and load that URL. This is a real time saver and a great usability improvement!

iZone Rating: 4/5

3. Netcraft Toolbar

“The Netcraft Toolbar uses Netcraft’s enormous databases of Web site information to show you all the attributes of each site you visit on the Web, including the sites’ hosting location, country, longevity and popularity. It also mobilizes the Netcraft community into a giant neighborhood watch scheme to empower the most alert and experienced members to protect the vulnerable against fraud and attacks.”

With phishing defenses built into Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 some people have questioned the usefulness of the Netcraft Toolbar and consider it superfluous. I disagree. Netcraft’s phishing detection has been rated the best there is and with protection being time critical, I prefer my information coming from the horse’s mouth. The toolbar also allows you to report undetected phishing sites easily, so you can be proactive in protecting others. You could even win an iPod!

Besides protecting you from phishing sites, the toolbar can identify XSS (Cross Site Scripting) attacks and the other information displayed on the toolbar can help you judge the legitimacy of other potential scams.

On the downside, the toolbar does consume rather a large amount of browser real-estate and a status bar version would be happily received!

iZone Rating: 4/5

4. Download Statusbar

“View and manage downloads from a tidy status bar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.”

The Download Statusbar extension replaces the download popup window with a subtle status bar that appears at the bottom of the browser window. The extension is fully customisable and can be tailored to suit your exact requirements. You can also specify an anti-virus application to auto-scan files as you download them.

Despite not adding much additional functionality, Download Statusbar greatly improves the usability of downloads in Firefox and is a very useful extension.

iZone Rating: 4/5