22.1 Avoiding Web Headaches with the Web Developer Extension for Firefox

The Web isn’t always the most hospitable landscape for a developer. You’re faced with a number of challenges: browser-compatibility issues, user-controlled settings (resolution, cookies, etc.), standards compliance, accessibility requirements, HTML, CSS, and so much more. Due to the Web’s somewhat organic growth, there isn’t a single IDE that addresses all these issues—there’s no Visual Studio or Eclipse that you can fall back on to iron out all the difficulties. Even the best web-development tools tackle only a small portion of what is required of a good web developer. The worst make your life even harder.

One application that most web developers adopted quickly was the Firefox browser. It’s faster and lighter than Internet Explorer, and it includes much better support for web standards (and fewer proprietary tags). Another huge benefit of using the Firefox browser for development is the availability of the Web Developer Extension, which packs a tremendous amount of functionality built specifically for web developers into an easy-to-use toolbar. Don’t let the 1.02 version number deceive you—this extension has been around since 2003, when it started at version 0.1, and it has become the web developer tool against which all others are judged.

Web Developer Extension for Firefox at a Glance

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Web Developer Extension ...

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