Domain: chrispederick.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to chrispederick.com.
Comments · 90
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Re:Did they restore "delay image loading"?
The Web Developer toolbar extension exposes a lot of different options to control image loading. It might have what you need.
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Re:Your task: explain how Net Neutrality stops thi
You can change your user agent in the web browser on your computer to fool T-Mobile into thinking you are using the mobile browser. No data cap unless you go way overboard and keep streaming movies all the time.
Also use PDAnet http://pdanet.co/ to connect the cellphone to the pc.
Do not use the usb connection but instead bluetooth or wifi as T-Mobile can somehow detect the wired usb connection back to your pc. PDAnet will be coming out with a version with the ability to also change the user agent.From their site under Help:
When using PdaNet+ T-Mobile shows a web page to subscribe their tether plan. What can I do?You will need to hide tether usage from T-Mobile using USB mode. On the computer side click on the PdaNet tray icon and select Settings->Hide Tether Usage->Level I. Also turn on flight mode and turn it off to reset the data session if you are already blocked.
Download for Firefox.
http://chrispederick.com/work/...Display the user agent you have:
http://www.iopus.com/imacros/d... -
Booo, hissss
First: Search for the addon Status-4-evar [sic] to keep/replace your status bar.
Second: Product manager Asa Dotzler, is this the same person responsible for some of the abominable changes in 4.0?
Third: "Separate Bookmark Star from locationBar and merge with Bookmarks Menu item", well that sucks. (Also, if you hate having stop and refresh as one button, edit the tool bar and drag stop to the left of refresh. Who's bright idea was it to combine those two? I want to hit stop, and if I hit it more than once, it starts to refresh the entire page. The exact opposite of what I want!)
Fourth: Tabs under the address bar please. I don't care about your ideas about how it's illogical, I am more likely to want to change tabs than to click on the address bar, and if I need to get to the address bar I can use ctrl-L or alt-D.
Fifth: I hate the Chrome UI, the new MSIE UI and similar. Don't do it to Firefox as well!
Sixth: From the article: "In this vein, there is a discussion of removing the Add-on Bar completely, killing user-created custom toolbars, and having the main toolbar feature a dedicated area for add-on buttons and widgets instead." What a bloody awful idea. What will I do with my Web Developer toolbar than?
Seventh: It doesn't matter what anyone thinks, Mozilla will push these changes through regardless. Just because. We can only hope that addons will be developed to revert the more moronic changes (like getting rid of the status bar).
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I'd miss firebug and web developer
Firefox is really the bees knees for web development....
firebug for javascript...and the poorly named web developer plugin for css make firefox a potent tool.
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Re:Its the USERAGENT string
You mean like User Agent Switcher?
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Re:Repeat after me
Firefox user agent switcher, it reports to web sites that it is IE 6-8, Googlebot 2.1, MSNbot 1.1, Yahoo Slurp and Iphone 3.0, out of the box; and you can add any user agent you want too, even make up your own. I'll have to play with it more than I have, a lot of sites let Googlebots through their paywalls, but not user browsers.
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User agent switcher helps a bit
User agent switcher turns some things on in Firefox.
http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
with following settings:
Safari
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; ja-jp)
Mozilla
Safari
4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
MacIntel
[empty]
[empty]A lot is broken though.
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Re:But Opera develops all new features first!
Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug
I propose a new betting pool: How long until an Opera fanatic claims Opera developed Dragonfly first, and Firebug is just a ripoff.
Actually before Dragonfly opera had a different set of developer tools, called Developer Console
Opera Developer Console
Opera now includes a developer console that can be added into the browser with many new features. The developer console includes new tools including DOM inspector, JavaScript inspector, CSS editor and HTTP header inspector.
Which were released 15 Nov, 2006, and on my research that is a year or so before firefox.
Link: http://dev.opera.com/tools/
That's not a comparison for Firebug, it's their version of the Web Developer extension. Also, that's not a "year or so" before Firebug: oldest post in Firebug group is 18th Nov, 2006
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
For interested Linux users, I used this Firefox extension to spoof my browser id and download it.
Between the windows-exclusivity, secret updater installs and dodgy download rules i'd say this is my 2nd worst google release ever. The worst is still googletalk, which I need on a daily basis and *still* has no linux or mac port years after it was released. Fuck google's attitude, seriously. -
Re:Where's the web developer add-on?
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Re:Times changeOne way to find the mobile page for a web site is to load the main page using a mobile device. Most of the time, you will get a client side redirect to the mobile page. Then email that page's URL to yourself and use that URL from your desktop. For example,
/.'s mobile page is http://slashdot.org/palm/ and Yahoo's mobile page is http://us.m.yahoo.com/Another way to get to the mobile pages easily from your desktop is to change your browser's user agent, the string sent to a web server to let it know what browser you're using.
This is quite a nice little FF extension to allow quick switching: http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/. The user agent for IE6 on Windows CE is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE)", and there's lots more about if you google.
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Re:Who uses Hotmail with Firefox on Linux?
Linux is my primary OS and I use Hotmail only for legacy purposes every now and then since the account dates back to 1997. The new interface is essential to quickly remove all of the spam compared to the original version. It is still inferior to gmail. I figured out this user agent issue months ago. Firefox Windows works, but any other user agent combination does not. On the rare occasion that I check my hot male, I have to remember to switch the user agent and then switch it back. There is a handy firefox plugin to help this called User Agent Switcher. http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/ Keep in mind that Firefox Windows is not a predefined choice so you must manually add an entry with the proper value.
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Re:User-Agent = breakage
Most of the time, thanks to a combination of the User Agent Switcher and boredom, I'm usually seen from the other end to be browsing on a Commodore 64, a GE washing machine, or a potato with wires stuck into it.
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Re:Extension...
I don't know if any extension supports this already, but assigning custom user agents to individual web sites is listed on the To-Do list for the User Agent Switcher extension.
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Re:Extension...
I don't know if any extension supports this already, but assigning custom user agents to individual web sites is listed on the To-Do list for the User Agent Switcher extension.
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I don't like it.
I use the Firefox plugin Web Developer ( http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ ) to turn off page images and colors and to use firehose I have to turn both back on. To me this would be similar to requiring people to turn off NoScript. I hope the regular old method of browsing
/. continues on. -
Re:Absolutely right
Would you mind actually sharing that base layout, in some form or another?
It's a heavily modified form of this layout.
Follow up question is how do you code your frontend side...
Pretty low-tech really--
Tools:
As for the process, I write the markup, then write the CSS with frequent tests in a compliant browser (I use Firefox, but Opera or Safari would work equally well--even IE7 is not too bad for this--along with occasional adjustments to the html and a few trips to the validator just to catch any typos. The last step is browser testing, but this is usually just a matter of fixing one or two IE float/haslayout bugs and fixing the box model problems in IE 5.x Win.
The key as I see it to successful HTML/CSS development in applications is to develop the markup and CSS as much as possible separately from the logic, and to always use the simplest possible markup with meaningful classes and ids but with absolutely no presentational attributes in the HTML for application output. I've spent more hours trying to fix scripts and code that thought it'd be a great idea to hardcode shit like "<td background="#ffcc00">Foo</td>" than it ever took me to learn to use CSS in the first place.
A modular approach works well; you can design the 'page' markup and CSS as one item, and then design each of the different sorts of output as individual components, copy them into the page to make sure you haven't borked your layout accidentally, then build the logic that outputs the HTML you designed (or pass the code off to whoever's going to be doing that job).
I suggest designing the HTML separately as a means of helping to bugfix the back end stuff--if the HTML on its own was ok, any later problems must be in the application logic.
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Re:Dumb speculations
Take a look at the Web-developer extension for firefox.
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Try This....
Instead of using the IE Tab extension, try using the User agent. http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/
It'll make Firefox tell the website that it is IE even though its still using the IE rendering engine. That'll let you know for almost sure whether or not the site would work fine with Firefox if they would just let it. -
"Subscribe to view" pages visible to Googlebot.
"Subscribe to view" webpages that are still visible to users browsing as GoogleBot.
User agent switcher extension + Browse pretending to be GoogleBot = Annoying "register/pay to see me!" pages go away. I have no idea how many sites it works on now, but I think it still gets into a lot of archived newspaper articles and suchlike. -
Here's a list of mine...
I've posted my list back about a year ago, and I still use every single one of them every day... (I also describe how to get around a "bug" in FF that forbids non-standard port connections). Check it out here. I also spoke at my local LUG about the same thing in January.
Here's a list of the extensions I'm currently using in my Firefox build (you can see how I have it tricked out with all of my theming and extensions over here):
- Sage, a really slick and fast rss aggregator/reader for Firefox. It docks on the sidebar and is visible with a simple Alt-S keystroke. Very nice, and easy for me to catch up on some quick headlines when I need to.
- AdBlock Plus with the AdBlock Filterset G Updater to stop the flood of useless ads from coming at me. I did have to add one small rule for Google's ads, because I do actually like the recommendations they provide from time to time, and it helps out sites I visit with a little revenue. That regex looks like this: @@*.googlesyndication.com/*
- Web Developer, a very useful and slick toolbar/menu driven suite that allows me to do all kinds of things to websites I'm viewing, including validation, showing where their css classes are, manipulating forms, cookies, images, and dozens of other features. Hands-down, the most-useful extension I have as a developer/tweaker of web content.
- PrefBar, another powerful extension I use every single day. This one allows me to change the capabilities of my browser with a simple click of a checkbox. Want Java enabled? Click. Sick of popups? Click. I have Colors, Images, Javascript, Java, Flash, Popups, Proxies, Pipelining, Referers, Cache on my bar. Its completely customizable, and very well-done.
- SwitchProxy lets me manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. I can also use it as an anonymizer to protect my system from prying eyes. I have Squid, Squid + Privoxy, Privoxy + Tor and i2p enabled in my configuration at the moment. Quick and easy, and one status-bar dropdown lets me change from one to another.
- FasterFox gives me a little boost by auto-configuring some parameters for faster browsing, such as link prefetching, pipelining, DNS cache, paint delay, and others.
- ForecastFox, weather.. in my status bar. I've changed the icons a bit with a separate icon pack called Lansing, which is nice adn small and out of the way. Minimal is the way to go on my toolbars and status bars.
- Linky lets me open or download all or selected links in a page, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows. A simple right-click on any link or web address, and away I go.
- Google PageRank Status gives me a quick overview of the PR of a site in the current view. This is useful as I do a lot of web work, and knowing what kind of sites get a decent or poor PR is useful information.
- SearchStatus is another SEO toolbar fo
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There are some work-arounds though
websites that use Flash media which claim that the latest version distributed by Novell as part of OpenSuSE 10 is not complaint. Yet as far as I'm aware the versions correlate, so it's just bad scripting on the part of bands and others who insist on using Flash in their websites, not a problem with the deployed tools or browsers.
Thankfully, there are things that can be done about some of these sorts of problems, like changing the user agent (use about:config in Firfox) or using tools like Greasemonkey, Web Developer and Firebug to "fix" poorly designed web sites. Unfortunately, these tools are unknown to most users and some are difficult for the average user to use and even power users ofen find it more work than it's worth to fix bad sites.
I've never liked the idea of coding to a browser. Use the standard query tags to determine the browser capabilities -
Re:med school apps suck
One of my favorite extensions takes care of that problem.
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Re:Weird sitemeter report.
Sitemeter reports aren't that dependable, anyone can send it anything if they want. Thanks to boredom and Firefox's User Agent Switcher extension, I regularly clog up my friends' sitemeters with apparent hits from a Sega Master System, a brain in a jar, a GE washing machine, or the Mysterious Stone Tablets of Atlantis.
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Web Developer and HTML Validator Extensions!
My biggest web devel tool is Firefox, with the Web Developer extension and the HTML Validator extension. The former does all sorts of amazingly neat things like letting me get precise info about any element within a page (using "Dispaly Element Information" under the "Information" menu, CTRL+SHIFT+F for short), showing me the HTTP response headers to any given page, add custom styles to a page, validate links, check for Section 508 accessibility compliance, resize the window for simulating lower screen resolutions, and on and on and on!
The latter does instantaneous HTML validation using Tidy and displays any errors or warnings on the "view source" page. It also gives me LINE NUMBERS in the view soucrce window, which is a blessing. The beta version (which I prefer) lets you pick between the Tidy algorithm and the W3C's SGML parser. The SGML parser version gives the same errors as the W3C's own online validator, but without any need to submit the page through an online form.
As for editing HTML, I generally use SciTE or one of its derivatives (eg Notepad2). Sadly, those aren't available under Mac OS X, so when I need to work on a Mac box I use Smultron. THAT, however, is just an editor. People get religious about their editors, so my advice is just to pick one that suits you and ignore anybody what sniggers at you. -
Re:Help me ! - with my work situation and IE
Have you tried the User Agent Switcher extension?
http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/ -
Re:$%*&^! web-designer BS
Yeah, but Moz' based browsers are extensible!
$10 says the site renders fine, minus some dodgy JavaScript or weird CSS hacks. -
Re:CSS help
It could be padding. You don't mention it.
I would suggest you get the Web Developer Extension from http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/ for Firefox. It will let you do all kinds of neat things. The one I use the most is 'Outline Block Level Elements'. It lets me see the 'box' model. It's great for figuring out quirks like this. -
Re:That's the whole pointIf by "useless crap" you mean overhead due to eye-candy graphics, you're wrong. I just tried looking at the new design with CSS disabled. (This is a feature of Firefox's Web Developer Extension, which no serious HTML author should be without.) I basically saw everything I saw with CSS enabled, but without the fancy formatting. Really, the people who get saved from "crap" are the people with CSS support, since they get the eye-candy without the overhead of graphic file download.
The designner obviously didn't do this check, or else he would have noticed that the <div> containing the left-hand sidebar gets displayed first, making the user do a lot of scrolling to get to the actually content.
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Re:I would say IDEs
i've had a number of candidates who can't talk about refactoring (in spite of its IDE support), can't talk about design patterns beyond "Singleton" (I make that an exception to the "Describe a design pattern" question), can't even write simple pseudo-code on a markerboard to draw a "tree" or write (or even just *use*) an iterator from a collection. to the work they've done they are very "productive" with an IDE, and are probably ok programmers.
but they've gotten so slaved by the IDE they've really lost the ability to think about programming to the level I need to see. these are "senior" developer candidates who don't know what i would consider to be the basic minimums of software development and the level of programming skills it requires.
they can use the IDE but they have no clue why it works.
While agree about the quality of candidates out there, I will say this: in the modern programming language world, those that can't even talk about refactoring generally aren't even jr level programmers - I don't care what their "resume" says.
That design pattern question being limited to "Singleton" (or Command Pattern) screams "procedural programmer" to me at best, and immediately lowers them to at most jr level with most likely heavy mentoring required to make them even moderately useful.
If they don't know a tree, see above. In the Java realm, depending upon domain, Iterators should either be carefully and barely tolerated or not used at all. I can understand why some wouldn't use them, but they should know why. If you wonder about this statement, review concurrent access (lack of) guarantees regarding iterators and the backdoor into synchronized code they allow. But that's another whole story that I don't have time to delve into.
I tend to disagree with your base premise that these are probably ok programmers slaved to their IDEs. I hold the position that these folks are able to do some "programming" (the basic working with code) due to the IDE existance, but in no way are "real" programmers or software developers. I agree that there are lots of these types of folks out there.
In my mind, a SR dev can take a set of requirements, validate and create an estimate for meeting those requirements. They can also be handed a mess of code and understand it in relatively short periods of time. They might even have flashes of insight into how to create better code for a particular problem domain than general best practices, which they are familiar with.
Lastly, on the JSP/JSF/Spring/Ajax/JS/HTML/etc front - worry, worry a lot. There's new toolkits/frameworks coming out for these almost daily. ;) Some are good, and will help those who understand the problem domain be excessively productive. It will allow those who don't to badly hack code. As for CSS - that's mostly outside my realm as my experience with it has been minor, but there seem to be some neat tools for messing with it available for Firefox/Mozilla. Same goes for JS/Ajax. Check out Bookmarklets, a better Error Console, and Firebug, not to forget the venerable Web Dev. I have yet to check out Google's GWT. -
I know I'm not alone here but...
I use Firefox over Opera mainly because I live alongside the web developer toolbar. Not the optimal way to code in all situation but great for squashing formatting bugs. http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/
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Re:Where to start with Slashcode
Or install the webdeveloper toolbar and edit the CSS on the fly.
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Re:Problem with hosts...
And AdZap for squid was doing it before that. With roaming laptops and such, I found it easier to just install AdBlock which was much more effective.
With anti-adblocking code out there (along with javascript malware,) NoScript for FF is also a must. User Agent Switcher is also cool - make your browser look like a search engine such as googlebot... Can lead to interesting results on some sites. -
Re:Problem with hosts...
And AdZap for squid was doing it before that. With roaming laptops and such, I found it easier to just install AdBlock which was much more effective.
With anti-adblocking code out there (along with javascript malware,) NoScript for FF is also a must. User Agent Switcher is also cool - make your browser look like a search engine such as googlebot... Can lead to interesting results on some sites. -
Re:EE cookies
I'd love a Firefox extension that lets you quickly bring up a list of cookies applicable only to the domain of the currently-viewed page, so I can edit/delete them.
There's a facility for doing this in Chris Pederick's excellent Web Developer extension. It lets you view cookies for where you currently are by both domain and path, clear them, add them, disable cookies from third-party domains like advertisers, etc.
If you don't want the whole Web Developer toolbar (which may have a lot of stuff you don't need) you can use the standard Firefox toolbar manager dialog to put the Cookies menu on one of your existing toolbars.
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Web Developer plugin kicks ass! Just turn off fool
I love the Web Developer plugin for the Mozilla browsers like Firefox. When it's installed, it's trivially easy to select the CSS drop down menu, the select the Disable Styles - Individual Styles and uncheck slashdot_fool.css. The pink goes away just like that. I'm sure there are other ways to do that, but this was just so cool that I had to share. Though, I guess that using the Edit CSS sidebar is even more cool because you can see the colours change AS YOU TYPE in the CSS window.
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How to turn the pink off
To turn off slashdot's pink april fool's crap(in firefox), get this and install it.
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/
Go to the CSS menu on the toolbar, choose "disable styles->individual stylesheet->slashdot_fool.css"
You'll have to do it for every page, but at least your eyes won't burn out of their sockets. -
Re:HTTP headers
Well if you have the Web Developer extension (http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/) for Firefox you can click the Information menu and click View Response Headers
:)
X-Bender: Aw, this bends!
X-Bender: I am a hideous triumph of form and function.
X-Bender: Shooting DNA at each other to make babies. I find it offensive! -
Re:How to change user-agent; was: Re:No.
I downloaded the User Agent Switcher extension, which looks like it should work for you. I just set my Windows/Firefox agent to be the same as on my Mac:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
You can just click on Tools>User Agent Switcher>Options and add a new one. It should work until Google starts giving away Mac/Linux native versions of their video player...at which point the non-DRM files will probably go away. -
Re:So I'll be the first to say it....
I've never found a FF extension which added a genuinely useful feature that wasn't already in Opera, with the exception of GreaseMonkey, (which enjoys full support in the upcoming 9.0 release).
Then maybe you haven't looked at all.
- The Javascript Debugger - Where is the opera equivilent? Bloated? It adds one menu item in tools and an optional icon on the toolbar for easy access
- Web developer toolbarThis is something no web developer should be without. You can edit the css of the site you're viewing! You can resize the browser to common sizes to check it renders okay. Opera equivilent?
So you're not a web developer? How about things like FxIF which lets you view Exif data from digital camera shots off the web - find out the camera model used to take the photo as well as the settings.
Opera is lean, and it's fast and compared to IE, it just rocks. But featurewise, it doesn't come close to firefox and that can wholely be attributed to extensions.
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Use CSS
If your site is written properly, i.e. using CSS for layout, then at the very least you can simply disable CSS for mobile visitors, not very pretty but doesn't block any content. The best option would be to have a style sheet with it's media set to handheld to tailor the content they see. Hide unnecessary stuff, and format the rest in a compact fashion:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="handheld.css" />Opera is useful for testing these styles (Shift+F11) and the Web developers toolbar adds this feature to firefox. A very well made site compatible with handhelds is none other than opera.com, everything on their site has a well optimised handheld version.
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Re:IE only store
Of course you can always use User Agent Switcher http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/
in Firefox to make the site think your using IE. -
Re:fee for content vs. search engines
have you ever seen a new york times article appear in google?
Yes, because the Googlebot is a special exception on the NYTime's website (and a handful of other news-related subscription websites) and can go through anytime.
Drop the Googlebot's User Agent String [ Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html) ] into your browser if you're using Opera, or Firefox with Chris Pederick's User Agent Switcher extension, Safari and Konqueror probably provide User Agent faking as well. Then try to reach a "subscription only" NYTimes page, switch your UAS to Googlebot's, boom you're allowed in.
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Re:Sad people
there is an addon called user agent switcher. http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/ "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050804 Firefox/1.0.6"
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Web Developer
At work I have the Web Developer Extension installed on my web development box. This very useful toolset has helped me to diagnose and solve many tricky design issues. I highly recommend it.
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Re:I think they were warnedYou should try this firefox extension: http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/
Sweet! Works like a charm. Thanks!
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Re:I think they were warned
You should try this firefox extension: http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/
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So many to choose from...
- Ablock Plus - Auto pull of filterset-g, whitelists, and "give the website credit by downloading but don't display"
- Translate - Quick translation of any page by selection from the tools menu
- Live HTTP Headers
- EditCSS
- Tab Mix - Most features you would expect from a tab extension, including session save and recovery
- Web Developer
- Disable Targets for Downloads - prevents blank windows/tabs from being opened when you try to download a binary file
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For Web Developers
My favourites:
Makes developing websites and web applications that much easier.
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Re:Experienced vs Novices
My opinion is that you're smoking crack. The Web Developer extension is written by a single person. What makes you think that it's unfair that he has had some experience? It doesn't appear that he's getting paid for his work (except the PayPal donation button on his site). He's an amateur too. Maybe we should restrict the Olympics to first-time athletes, to make it "fair".