Mozilla Firefox

For any web developer, Mozilla Firefox is the web browser of choice. Infact, it should be everyone’s web browser of choice! It’s fast, efficient, reliable, and best of all, highly adaptable!

Aside from it’s great built-in features, Firefox is incredibly easy to expand with user submitted add-ons. Just take a look at Firefox’s official add-on page or if you’re already using Firefox, click ‘Tools’ > ‘Add-ons’ in your toolbar. There’s thousands to choose from and if you’ve thought in the past: “if only Firefox could do this”, it probably can! You just haven’t found the add-on yet.

At ITM Design, we primarily use Firefox for developing our websites (and later test for cross browser compatibility in other browsers) as well as day to day Internet browsing. Since it’s release, we’ve found many useful add-ons for Firefox, some that greatly improve our productivity, others that just make our day a little easier. Read on to find our top ten favourite Firefox Add-ons…

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Every website coder knows one of the most time consuming aspects of writing a website is writing it to look the same in all browsers. Sometimes, the difference between browsers seems so big that it feels like you’re going to have to make several versions of the website code just to make it look the same in each of the browsers.

Why should I be concerned about cross browser compatibility?

Netscape - The Internet's first web browser - popular in the mid 90's, now defunct

As a website coder it is important to realise the differences between browsers. In the early days of the Internet, browser developers would add functionality to their browsers that could be past on to a website coder to give them more features when writing a website. To start with, this was great for everyone, but as browser developers became more competitive, the exclusivity between browser features meant that websites were being developed with one browser in mind. If that website were viewed in a different browser, the browser would be missing the features the website would be expecting the user to have, and as such, cross browser compatibility issues began to arise.

Today, website coders still have these issues to contend with, despite efforts made by W3C and various other organisations to persuade browser developers to follow standards set by W3C. Furthermore, as different issues exist in different browsers, a website today must still be built to work in older browsers as well.

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Your website design is finished and you have lots of fresh content for your visitors to read. You’ve already read our ‘What is SEO?‘ post and now have a well optimised website, but how can you start driving traffic (visitors) to it?

As with any project, the best way to build interest is by talking and writing about it, in a place that is relevant to your own website. Not only will you start to see a steady income of traffic but this is great for optimisation too!

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