Essential Firefox Setup (for web developers)

My iBook died a few days ago, so now I have a MacBook and just got it setup last night. One of the first things I installed was Firefox.

There are 2 main reasons I use Firefox instead of Safari. The first is find-as-you-type search. This means as you type what you're trying to find on a webpage, Firefox highlights matches as you type instead of waiting for you to press Enter.

The second reason I use Firefox is that there are a few indispensable extensions for web development. Here are all the details of my essential Firefox setup:

Essential preferences:

  1. In preferences, set my homepage: google ig -- not great, but loads quickly

  2. In preferences, save downloads to ~/downloads -- you need to create this directory if you want to do this

  3. * important * In preferences under security, set _Use a master password_ so your passwords are not stored in plain text

  4. setup delicious, a bookmarking tool that stores all your bookmarks on a web page you can access any time and organize using tags. go here and get the delicious bookmarklet. i like to rename the post bookmarklet to and the my delicious to del.view

  5. i also like to add an rss feed of what my friends are looking at and my own recent posts. I name these del.friends and respectively

  6. i also use a delicious tag my_bb to save a folder of bookmarks that are my favorites and that i want easy access to from my firefox bookmarks toolbar

Essential Extensions:

  1. firebug for javascript debugging and DOM inspection

  2. web developer for live css editing and other useful development tools

  3. backpack pages for quick links to your backpack pages

  4. backpack publish for quick posting to your backpack

Configuring Extensions:

  1. add the backpack buttons to the toolbar (and remove the rest of the buttons if you don't like them)

  2. hide the web developer toolbar if you don't like it at the top

  3. enter the api keys for the backpack extensions

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