I found an interesting web that has all kinds of great information on website design. A highlighted a couple posts that I thought were very interesting: 10 Unusual Places to Get Design Inspiration and 10 Useful Firebug Extensions. You seriously should click on the design inspiration link, especially if you want to see how creative people can really be; check the beautiful web sites and unforgettable business cards. Truly amazing!
I also did not realize that people were building plug-ins to extend plug-ins! What a concept! I guess that is what makes Firefox such a powerful web browser, tool, platform; there are plug-ins to do about everything. I previously blogged about Firebug and YSlow, but I did not realize that Firebug was also a platform for other developer centric tools, such as HTML validation and code coverage. Someone was nice enough to create a Mozilla Collection for Web Debug Tools, it provides links to all of the referenced plug-ins.
I recently found a plug-in that I wanted to share as well, called IE Tab. A couple of weeks ago, I was working on a web application and was validating the browser compatibility of our CSS; it was kind of painful switching back and forth between the IE and Firefox, especially since I preferred using Firefox. Fortunately, I discovered IE Tab, which is unfortunately not available on Linux! It simply embeds Internet Explorer in a Firefox tab to render the current page’s content. There will be a little browser icon in the lower right-hand corner of the window; it indicates which browser was used to render the page/tab. Just click on the icon to switch between the two rendering approaches. I think this is much better than having two switch between browsers! Maybe I’m just lazy! There is one small short coming using this approach, it can only use the version of Internet Explorer that you have installed on your computer. I happened to be using IE8 and our testers were using IE6. Needless to say, we had a couple of unexpected issues! Can you believe that IE6 is still being used? I think I would go crazy with out tabbed browsing!
