Why You definitely must abandon Internet explorer and become smarter

Plugins that make you more productive

Ok I am not going to bash Internet Explorer 6 and above, many have done it before and will do it in the future until IE disappears, the reason IE exists is because Microsoft forces you to use it by bundling it with Windows. If you are still wondering what Firefox has more than IE, download it and install it, I'll show you.

For now, here is the list of addons that I use:

• Firebug : deep insight into a web page for debugging
• yslow : addon to Firebug, tweaking page download speed
• foxmark : synchronize bookmark on two computers
• fireftp : ftp client
• colorzilla : color picker
• Web developper toolbar : wabpage analysis design oriented
• Greasemonkey : script engine for productivity purpose
• html validator : help you validate your page
• jsview : view all css, javascript loaded with a page
• searchstatus : useful pagerank and alexa rank display
• seo4firefox : great tool from Seobook
• seotoolbar : even more terrific tool from Seobook
• seoquake : an alternative to seo4firefox
• tabmixplus : too many tabs? no problem
• livehttpheader : let you peek into the messages sent and received from an http server
• flagfox : display country of the server the page is hosted on
• googleglobal : perform multicountry Google query

To install a plugin, I mean your first plugin, you can try Firebug if you are a web developper, or Web developper toolbar, those are both addons that are very useful. Firebug has many features that will help you solve any unpleasant CSS issue. You have a gap between your image and the div block, and you cannot figure out why despite looking back and forth your CSS stylesheet? Just use the Inspect function and click on any HTML element, you'll have an extensive list of CSS properties as rendered on the page. I will write a review of Firebug later.

I'll cover them one by one in the future.