When doing design work, I've found Firefox to be a big help for increasing my productivity.  I've been using Firefox 2 and IE 7 yesterday, and as much as I appreciate the improvements Microsoft has made in the new IE, it is still fundamentally a very closed system.  The beauty of Firefox is its openness; there is a wealth of great extensions, so let me list a few.  As I put this list together, I realized how remarkable Firefox is, allowing me to replace scores of external design applications.

And  yes, I still use IE, but rarely for design work.  I have to use it for testing, since most web site visitors still use it, and it does (ahem) take more than a few liberties with the CSS standard. 

My favorite Firefox extensions for designers

1. You have to have the Web Developers toolkit, a series of buttons and menus for common tasks like outlining page structure, displaying form and image information, and bringing up various inspectors.
2. Next is View Formatted Source, which is my favorite way to debug CSS and to reverse-engineer other designs and layouts.  Holding the mouse over an element will display its cascade of style definitions, even giving you the line number in the style sheet.  Indispensable, and one of the main reasons I love Firefox for design.
3. Use Window Resizer to quickly make your browser a different size for testing.
4. MeasureIt adds a little button to bring up a virtual tape measure, so you can quickly determine the dimensions of an areas on the browser. 
5. ShowIP displays the IP address of the page you're currently viewing. 
6. Bring up a page form Firefox in IE with IEView. 
7. After updating extensions, Quick Restart is a great way to close and restart Firefox.
8. The Disable XPI Install Delay tool eliminates that annoying few seconds you have to wait when installing new extensions; comes in quite handy when installing a bunch of extensions.
9. Public IP displays the public IP address of your computer. (waiting for a 2.0 version)
10. Pallette Grabber creates a Photoshop-style color pallette from the current page.
11. Annoyed by long URLs?  This one creates nice short ones.
12. Venkman is an interactive Javascript debugger, quite useful.
13. Use Plain Old Favorites to access and modify your IE favorites list.
14. FireColour is a color picker and converter.
15. Use the HTML Validator extension to hook up to the CSE HTML Validator. I'm a big fan of CSE, and love the ease of use of this integration.
16. Use Link Checker to test the validity of links on a page.
17. Table2Clipboard grabs data from a tbale into the clipboard, but without the annoyin spacing characters you'd otherwise have to remove.
18. Lori indicates the time it takes to load a page.
19. Add a right-click context item to open an image in a new tab.

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