YAFFPIL – (Yet Another Favorite Firefox Plug-Ins List)
I’ve seen enough of these out there and I think its time for me to put in my two cents on this topic. Firefox plugins are the main reason I do all my development using FF first and IE second. Well, let’s dive right in shall we?
-  Firebug – There are very few truly excellent development tools out there, but this one tops the chart for me. Useful for doing heavy troubleshooting of the most complicated websites, allows you to monitor everything from the DOM tree to the load times and even track the XMLHttpRequest traffic in your favorite Web 2.0 site. Tweak CSS on the fly to tweak it until its right, then cut and paste the tests back to your source without having to constantly reload the page. This one is a web developer’s dream come true.
- Web Developer Toolbar – If there is something that complements Firebug, this is the toolkit.  A little bit of everything you need, and few things that you don’t. Its almost overwhelming when you first look at the list of actions you can take with this. I mostly use it to play with cookies and cache settings on the fly, not to mention the built in screen resize options allow you to preview the site on all the standard resolutions at the click of the mouse.
- Tab Mix Plus – Tabs are where it’s at, and as good as Firefox tabs are, they just aren’t customizable enough for me. Tab Mix Plus to the rescue. It adds more options than you can shake a stick at, and to top it off, comes with an integrated session manager.
- IE View Lite – Face it, the bulk of the world views the web through the rose colored glasses of IE. IE View Lite adds a context menu link to “View This Page in IE”. Right click, left click and BANG! Watch IE Blow up your beautiful standards compliant design.
- Screen Grab – Screenshots are always a useful tool. For troubleshooting, or just recording a funny bug for posterity. The biggest issue with using most screen shot tools is that they are limited to the visible screen. Not this little toy, it has options to either Save to disk or Copy to clipboard a selected region, the visible portion of the page or the entire page as a single continuous file. Nice for sending that preview to a client.
- FEBE and CLEO – A pair of tools that make backing up and copying your Firefox Profile a snap. FEBE is the backup utility, highly configurable, allowing you back up just about any part of your profile. It has a scheduler as well, allowing you to do it on a regular basis. CLEO compliments FEBE, you can select some or all of the backed up Plugins and Themes and it will create a single XPI file that you can then install into another copy of Firefox, giving you all your usual tools and themes on any number of installations.
- Colorzilla -A color picker, use the eydropper just like Photoshop, click on a part of the page and you can select the color of that pixel, very handy when you are told “Just make it match the color of the frob in the corner”.
- LiveHTTPHeaders – Useful in tracking the actual requests being made to the webserver and the responses being returned. Very handy in tracking problems with redirections and other fun header hi-jinks.
- LittleFox – Okay, before you complain, yes, this is a theme, and not a plugin, but I’m the type who wants the maximum real-estate to be available for the page, while still having access to all my tools. This minimalist theme works great for doing just that.
This is my primary toolkit, I do have a couple of other items I use regularly like Zend Toolbar, and Selenium IDE as well, but these are more specialized tools that I think have a less general audience than those above.
Yes I know, yet another list….but I hope my not so humble opinion will help someone out who might be looking for a solid set of tools for use in developing websites.