Saturday, December 12, 2009

20 essential firefox addons for testing

Firefox is one of the most important browser for testers working in web application domain. Specially, with all the add-ons around it, Firefox is certainly essential for testing web applications. Over a period of time, I have used plenty of add-ons to test various web applications. Following list of add-ons are extremely useful for testing web applications. There are add-ons useful for security testing, analyzing page source, accessibility, debugging and pretty much everything you need for web application testing. You can certainly enhance your productivity using some of these add-ons.
1. Firesizer 0.92
Provides a menu and status bar to resize the window dimensions to a specific size. This add-on is extremely useful if you want to test how your application will look in different size windows.

2. W3C Page Validator 3.0.0
This little add-on validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Depending on your context, if your organization is committed to create W3C compliant web applications, this might be very handy.

3. SQL Injection 1.2
This is an excellent tool to help developers in identifying SQL injection vulnerabilities. This add-on transform checkboxes, radio buttons and select elements to an input text box.

4.QuickRestart 1.1.5
If you need to restart firefox to test your cookies, sessions or because of any other reason, this little button in your toolbar will do it with a mouse click. This is a very simple utility, but can be extremely useful.

5. Firebug
If you are working in web application domain, I am sure you are already familiar with this add-on. Firebug, along with the development toolbar are absolute minimum your firefox should have if you are working in web application testing domain.

6. Regular Expression Tester
This small add-on allows you to test your regular expression. The tool includes options like case sensitive, global and multiline search, color highlighting of found expressions and of special characters, a replacement function incl. backreferences, auto-closing of brackets, testing while writing and saving and managing of expressions.

7. HttpFox
This add-on is an amazing tool if you want to dig deeper into http request / response and analyze all the traffic. Using this add-on, you can get information about request / response header, sent and received cookies, Querystring parameters, POST parameters and Response body.

8. HackBar 1.3.2
I haven't explored this myself, but from description it looks like it should be useful for SQL injections, XSS holes and site security.

9. Web Developer Toolbar
As mentioned earlier, this one along with the firebug are must have extensions if you are working in web application domain. These extensions are complete toolset and probably require separate articles to explain their capabilities.

10. Accessibar 0.7.8
Its an amazing add-on to test accessibility of any site. Using this add-on, you can change font size, line spacing, hide all the images / flash and so on. It also integrates text to speech reader and reads string on mouse hover / focus elements.

11. Add N Edit Cookies
There are very few applications which does not use cookies these days. This little add-on allows you to add / edit cookies and test how your application will respond to changes in the cookies setting.

12. LinkChecker 0.6.3
This is a very simple tool to check if there are any broken links on the web page. It highlights all the links in various colors to show if they are broken or not.

13. MeasureIt 0.3.8
If you have a design team which is very particular about the size of every element, than this little add-on can be used to test hight and width of all the elements. It draws a ruler around any element and shows hight / width of the element.

14. YSlow 2.0.0b3
YSlow analyzes web pages and gives you information on why they are slow based on the Yahoo's rule for high performance websites.

15. User Agent Switcher
If your application behaves differently based on the user agent or if it records this information than this add-on can be very handy. It simply switch the user agent of the browser. Please note, changing user agent will not make it render like IE.

16. FireShot 0.69
FireShot can be handy in situations where you want to take screen shot of your web application. It even allows you to write comments, highlight specific element of your application and so on.

17. URLParams 2.2.0
This little add-on make it convenient to analyze GET and POST parameters of the current website in the sidebar. You can ever change their values, add new parameters etc.

18. Tamper Data 10.1.0
Tamper Data allows you to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters. You can use it to test security of your web applications by modifying POST data and analyzing how your application will respond to those changes.

19. View Dependencies 0.3.3.0
This is an extremely useful add-on if you want to figure out what are all the files / images etc. are getting downloaded for every page, how much time they are taking and many such details.

20. Flash Switcher 2.0.2
If you are involved in testing Flash Applications, than this little add-on is extremely useful to test your flash application on various versions of flash players.

I have purposefully not included add-ons like Selenium and TestGen4Web , because they are separate test automation tools in themselves. Hope you found this list useful. Please add other interesting add-ons you have used in the comment, which are not listed above.

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