Sean Wiley (PAL/CCE)
One of the must-have Firefox extensions for web developers is Firebug. Firebug is most commonly used as a debugging tool because of its ability to facilitate alteration of web pages in ‘real time’. However, another aspect of this tool is its ability to modify web pages for personal use. In taking on the task of converting a webpage into, in this specific case, a desired pdf form, one issue that arose was the inability to modify certain fields integrated into the template, i.e. text fields, search/tool bars, jpeg images, etc. With the versatility of Firebug, you harness the power of modifying all aspects of a webpage into a desired form before saving it in a particular format. The most valuable aspect of Firebug is that as you change the HTML/CSS/JavaScript code, the changes are reflected immediately in the browser. Because of this “safe exploration”, FireBug is a tool that can be used by novices without much knowledge of the code as well as advanced programmers looking to implement an algorithm on the webpage. FireBug offers a diversity of development tools to the user; it can be used as not only a debugger, but also as a general-purpose modifier.