The Only James

Many years ago I would sit in front of a PC, rather than a Mac, long in to the wee hours of the morning. During those years Firefox was my browser of choice for every day browsing and more technical web-based geekery. After I switched to Mac I had a copy of both Firefox and Safari but FF started to annoy me and I started predominantly using Safari, electing to use FF only when occasionally necessary.

I was happy using Safari 2 & 3 with the Debug menu enabled (defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1.) After all, I had CSSEdit and Edit in TextMate available to me should I ever need to start tinkering (There is a FF version of Edit in TextMate although I haven’t tested it out.)

It was only after playing with the FF 3 Beta that I started to consider switching back when I needed to get super-geeky. After spending some time looking at hackthissite.org with a friend of mine I decided I needed a browser with more tech tools built-in allowing me to send POST headers etc. without having to write a PHP/Ruby script.

Since bringing back FF I’ve had to tweak my setup with a few plugins but I can now I’ve got my addons I’m pretty happy to get geeky with FF instead of Safari. I can’t stop using Safari because I’d miss the speed and the ability to resize all textareas (and the fact they’re Cocoa text fields!!) And draggable tabs and the gorgeous GUI and… I could go on and on.

The plugins I’m using at the moment are listed below. Please note, I do not support any of these plugins and can not guarantee the security or reliability of any content hosted externally.

• Firebug (of course!): a very useful debugging/development tool
• Delicious Bookmarks: useful addon that can export your FF bookmarks to del.icio.us and access your del.icio.us bookmarks in a sidebar within FF.
• Firecookie: adds cookie modification capabilities to Firebug.
• Google Gears: adds offline caching capabilities, which can be leveraged by web developers. The latest version of Wordpress can use Gears for example.
• Greasemonkey: allows you to run JavaScript each time a page is loaded. There are a number of scripts available for everything from adding SMS capabilities to GMail to inverting the colour scheme on Flickr!.
• Tamper Data: very geeky addon that can intercept and manipulate GET and POST requests while browsing.
• Web Developer: a nice accompaniment to Firebug. This addon is more suited to designers and feels slightly less geeky than Firebug. The GUI isn’t great as it has a hard-coded default FF for Windows colour-scheme, which doesn’t work well with the default FF for OS X theme.
• XPather: this is very very geeky! It’s beautiful. This addon provides a detailed GUI for interacting with XPath.
• YSlow: another additional tool for use in Firebug. This recommends ways to improve the speed of your website; or other people’s!