Recently while perusing the extensions for Firefox I discovered two very valuable extensions for Firefox, Web Developer 0.8 (http://webdeveloper.mozdev.org/) and IEview (http://ieview.mozdev.org/). And for those who don't know Firefox is a hot new and up and coming browser that in my opinion is hundred times better than Internet Explorer and this is coming from a long time user and supporter of IE!

Firefox uses the Mozilla engine just like Netscape and several other browsers so the two extensions Web Developer and IEview should work in any recent Mozilla compatible browser.

The Web Developer extension is packed full of features. The Web Developer toolbar has so many features that I won't go into detail about all of them. However, I would like to touch on the ones that I use the most. One of the most useful features is the validation feature which allows you to validate your website's HTML or XHTML using W3C's markup validation service. Not only does it have functions to validate your HTML or XHTML but it also can validate for CSS, Links, Section 508 accessibility and WAI accessibility.

Another feature I use when developing a new layout for a website is the resize feature which lets you to resize your browser to 800x600 or any other custom size that you want. Before I had this feature I had to change the screen resolution for my computer under the windows display settings which was kind of a hassle.

And for those web developers out there that have started developing websites that use CSS for layout it has some handy features that allow you to view the outlines of block level elements like Divs. It also has a feature that will allow you to see the Div ids as well as look at the CSS for a website and all with the click of a button. This is really handy if you're learning CSS layout and want to see how another website does it.

IEview is another handy little tool that allows you to open a website in IE by just right clicking on the page and then clicking, "View This Page in IE." This is handy because whether we like it or not something like 90% of the people out there still use Internet Explorer. However, this percentage is dropping thanks to Firefox. As a side note IEview doesn't work on a Mac.

Web Developer 0.8 and IEview are two great tools! If you're a web developer you need to go out and download a copy!