Firefox Extensions—Tools to Help Small Business Merchants Work Smarter

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Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

I was chatting with an acquaintance the other day and mentioned some Firefox extensions I use on a regular basis. The person just stared at me blankly as if I was speaking a different language—maybe I was speaking “tech-geek” and didn’t know it. So I figured if in a “techie” place like Silicon Valley someone (granted not an engineer or web developer) was only vaguely familiar with Firefox (or more importantly why it is useful) and had no clue about extensions, there may be a number of new merchants that could benefit from this information.

Developers and tech-enthusiasts: You, of course were the early adopters of Firefox and helped push the market share for this browser. You don’t need convincing of the usefulness of Firefox extensions. Just scan my list of useful extensions for merchants and add your own to the comments if I missed any good ones (feel free to take exception with my picks too).

So this post is really targeted for those fence-sitters that may be considering downloading and using Firefox but who really aren’t sure of the benefits to them in their daily tasks of running an ecommerce site, or maybe you have it downloaded but aren’t sure what the hype is about. Apart from being widely touted in the press as faster and more secure (use the links below to follow up on those claims), Firefox allows users to install “extensions”—small utilities that are available for free which users can just download, install, and use. These extensions can help you perform common tasks from within your browser that would normally require launching other programs or additional browser windows.

And without further ado, here are my picks for top extensions merchants may find useful:

Web Developer Extension

This extension is invaluable for web developers, especially so for developers using CSS to customize Checkout Manager pages. A few of the key features include:elope

Live editing of HTML and CSS
Outlining block level elements (useful for seeing how pages are constructed)
Resizing the browser window to test your designs at common screen resolutions
Measuring and layout tools (ruler and grid lines)

CSS Viewer

Ever want to know the CSS attributes of a page without having to view the page source or CSS file to get this info? This extension gives you the ability to hover over page elements and see the CSS attributes assigned to any element.

Colorzilla

Along the lines of the CSS Viewer, if you have ever seen a color or color combination on a site that you wanted to try on your site, this handy little extension can grab any color and convert to RGB or hexadecimal value for pasting into the Store Editor, a graphics editing program, or another design tool.

IE Tab

Opens a link in a tab in Firefox using the IE rendering engine allowing you to view how a page will look in IE. Anyone using custom CSS will appreciate being able to stay in one browser but test against both.

Session Saver

Ever close your browser by accident and wish you could get right back to the same page? This handy little widget allows you to do just that. Firefox allows for multiple tab browsing which is really cool, but if you are conditioned to click the close button for the window you may find yourself very thankful for this little widget. This may not work for all areas within the Store Manager that require you to sign in, but a quick check did show it worked for some.

And two SEO tool extensions for good measure:

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

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