Introduction

This extension is the big one - it offers a lot of useful information and features; I will do my best to cover most of them.

Disabling things

One of the first things I used this extension for was the disable option, which allows you to change settings without wading through the preferences menu. I primarily use it to disable styles to see how my pages would look in older browsers, or to disable images to see how it would work in text-only browsers (lynx etc.). Everything works as expected, and the “disable image animations” is an absolute godsend when viewing some beginners website’s (think geocities clipart style sites). All in all a very cool thing to be able to do.

CSS

Again, I love this; you can apply your own style sheet to a website - so if that gaudy background on your favorite website is getting on your nerves, simply whip up a style sheet with a white body background and black text and you have instantly readable type! This can also be used to test changes to your own website’s styles without FTP access.

You can also edit and view CSS on-the-go or, a GREAT feature is a “view style information” option which lets you see the inheritance hierarchy so you can see which styles are messing things up. I’m sure if you’re that way inclined this would also be pretty useful for javascript programming.

Playing with pictures

My favorite option here is the ability to display alt text instead of images - to see the page as a search engine does in other words. Whilst checking out (v3) infinite fire I found that hardly any of the images had alt or title tags; hopefully I can do better on this version!

The images feature also lets you hide images, display image dimensions and directory paths, as well as finding broken images.

Page layout features

Yet another great ability of this extension is that you can outline table cells, links without title attributes, frames, and especially for when using CSS, block level elements and deprecated attributes. These options came in VERY useful when developing v4 of Infinite-Fire, aspecially the block-level outline feature when laying out each page.

Another useful shortcut on this toolbar is the ability to validate your website to various standards (HTML, CSS, links, 508, WAI etc.) - this is a great idea if you are developing say for a minority audience (people who use screen readers etc.) and need to see if your site is accessable enough.

Conclusion

There are a few things I have left out, and a lot more features in the pipeline so if theres something missing you can probably get it included in the next release! One more feature I think deserves special merit is the ability to display various information such as class names and block (element) sizes on the page.

Overall I personally beleive this is the best extension for firefox, simply because of the huge number of features available and the fact that everything works. Because of this it gets a deserved 5 stars.