Firebug

I think one of the main reasons Firefox has has become more popular than Internet Explorer is due its large collection of plugins and the fact these these can be easily developed. We all go through a stage of going wild and downloading every plugin we come across, only to remove it two weeks later because our computer starts eating itself. However there are always a few which come in particularly useful, ones which have you chewing your leg every time you have to use Internet Explorer. One of my favorites is Firebug, an open source plugin for Firefox, which comes into its own when doing any type of web design. This plugin allows you you to edit, debug, profile and monitor the HTML, CSS and Javascript code in of any website within your browser, whats more you can do all of this in real time, without always having to reload the page. When viewing the HTML code on Firebug, it will colour code all the tags and arrange them in a way that even the most inexperienced coder could find their way around it. Another helpful tool included for HTML is the blue boxes that will appear on the page showing which part you are editing, for example, if you were to edit a form in Firebug a blue screen will appear over the form in the web page. Firebug is an essential tool for all web designers and would also come in useful if you were attempting to learn web coding. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the plugins integrated into future firefox releases, even a replacement or upgrade for 'view source code'.