It’s been a few months since I’ve had a good look at some of the newer Firefox extensions, but there are two that have really grabbed my fancy lately.
ScreenGrab
The first is ScreenGrab. Like many, I looked at this one and immediately thought ‘What the?… what can it do, that I can’t now?’.
The very worthwhile answer to that question is simple — it has the ability to capture all the parts of a long, scrolling page and then automatically glues it all together into one, long, shiny new PNG. If you’ve ever wasted minutes of your life doing this by hand you’ll recognize this as a very neat trick.
In fact, I can’t think of another application, client-based or otherwise that is able perform this seemingly simple task — this pony has but one trick, but it’s a good one.
DevBoi
The second nifty new string to the Firefox bow is Zhluk.com’s DevBoi.
Devboi is a Web developer reference sidebar for Firefox, at this stage cover HTML 4.01, CSSS2.1, DOM and XUL. I’d expect more will added over time. Although no single aspect of it is remarkable, the whole package is well thought-out and immediately useful.
The CSS reference uses ‘♥’, ‘½’, and ‘x’ to let you check browser support for any property at a glance, and links each one to PPK’s Quirksmode reference which details known inconsistencies, bugs and workarounds for that property.
The HTML reference shows a complete tag listing marking deprecated tags and other useful information, as well as linking to the W3C explanatory page for each tag. XHTML might be a useful update for the next version.
Devboi also includes a comprehensive DOM reference, a XUL reference and there’s even a Ruby and Rails reference in development — if you’re that way inclined.
All up, far too much to screen cap here, so I’ve thrown together a little demo to walk you through it. It showcases some of Devboi’s finer points along with my clunky control of Macromedia’s very impressive Captivate.
If you’re still unsure, Martin Cohen also provides a nice working online preview here for your test-driving pleasure.
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They should have named it “PageGrab”.
October 2nd, 2005 at 10:58 pm
http://devboi.mozdev.org/installation.html
October 2nd, 2005 at 11:47 pm
Very, very nice…
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:14 am
HyperSnap from Hyperionics has been doing ScreenGrab’s scrolling page grab trick on Windows boxes for years.
October 3rd, 2005 at 3:17 am
Finally an useful tool!
October 3rd, 2005 at 4:56 am
For the screenshot functionality there are also nice standalone apps (Freeware), e.g. for Windows there is URL2BMP (although other formats than BMP are supported) and for OS X there is Paparazzi.
October 3rd, 2005 at 5:11 am
Went to look at the screen grabbing extension, but the page I got just offered an upgrade of Firefox :(
If I had wanted to upgrade I can do so via the current Firefox installation, so wtf happened?
Anyone else get the upgrade page I ponder…
October 3rd, 2005 at 5:49 am
ScreenGrab is really nice, we’re working with it and are very satisfied … it has speed up our work alot !
October 3rd, 2005 at 5:50 am
I personally use Snagit to get those scrolling pages :)
October 3rd, 2005 at 7:14 am
if you get a firefox upgrade page then that probably means that your version of firefox is not new enough.
the firefox website will not allow the install of extensions on versions for which a newer version with security fixes exists.
so unless you have the latest version (which currently is 1.0.7) you will need to upgrade first before you can install any extensions.
October 3rd, 2005 at 10:30 am
Must say, I had to download the screengrab XPI to my desktop on then use ‘File/Open File’ to get it to install. Not sure why, but it worked.
October 3rd, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Dang, neither extensions work on Firefox 1.5 Beta.
I don’t care much for ScreenGrab, but Devboi looks mighty useful.
October 9th, 2005 at 12:29 am
Wonderful! ScreenGrab is just the feature I’ve been looking for!
October 28th, 2005 at 8:29 pm
Devboi: essential extension for web developers
Click for larger screenshot
Finally, Devboi has been updated for Firefox 1.5. If you aren’t familiar with it, its a sidebar extension that has full API docs for the following (from the homepage):
HTML 4.01 elements, attributes, and en…
December 16th, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Excellent, I can now incorporate screengrab into my QA reports.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
its very helpful for me.. :)
May 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm