Last week, one of my work­mates com­plained that ever since upgrad­ing to Fire­fox 1.0.6, his web devel­oper tool­bar didn’t work anymore.

I had a sim­i­lar prob­lem once before, and it drove me nuts for ages, until the light bulb came on that – duh – there’s a dis­able but­ton on the far right hand end of the tool­bar. Really close to the close tab but­ton, where it’s too easy to acci­den­tally hit it. Once you do, no more web devel­oper tool­bar for you! Until you hit it again, that is.

Turns out that was my co-worker’s prob­lem. Pre­sum­ably there must be a rea­son why it’s there, although I’m at a loss to think of one. I’ve since dis­cov­ered that by right-clicking the tool­bar area and select­ing “cus­tomise” you can drag but­tons around or off the tool­bar com­pletely, so I’ve removed the dis­able but­ton (even though I now know what it does).

That’s a pretty minor com­plaint though, as on the whole Chris Pederick’s Web Devel­oper Tool­bar is a fan­tas­tic tool, and with­out a doubt my most-used exten­sion. Two other really, really use­ful exten­sions for web-heads:

• Col­orzilla: colour eye­drop­per to sam­ple colours from the cur­rent page, and colour picker dia­log with heaps of dif­fer­ent palettes. Invalu­able when doing CSS work. While look­ing for the link for this exten­sion, I dis­cov­ered that it also allows you to zoom the page, and includes a DOM inspector.
• LoremIp­sum Con­tent Gen­er­a­tor: Pops up a handy dia­log where you can pick the num­ber of char­ac­ters, words, or para­graphs of filler text you want to gen­er­ate, in four dif­fer­ent styles. Also has a handy dia­log to copy the gen­er­ated con­tents straight to the clipboard.

I have a lot of other exten­sions installed, from major func­tion­al­ity providers like Grease­mon­key to tiny short­cuts like IE View, but the three listed above are the ones I con­sider most use­ful in my daily work. I used to trawl through the list of exten­sions on the Mozilla site quite reg­u­larly, but there’s so many now that’s not very practical!