Fellow web designers and developers, you all are in the search of tools that will simplify your life and speed up your development and testing. Well here’s my top 5 of the Firefox and IE plugins. It’s the essential toolkit, the cream. I really couldn’t work without them.

5. ColorZilla (Firefox)

ColorZilla allows you to eavesdrop a color from a web page, and sends RGB color codes (as decimal or hex) to your clipboard for you to paste in Photoshop. It also provides you with a color picker where you can adjust Red/Green/Blue and Hue/Saturation/Variance. My rating: 9/10.

4. Throttle (Firefox & IE)

Most good web developers — especially when they have a very good internet connection — want to try their web site on slow links. Now, there’s many ways to do this, such as simulating through a configuration in your router or through a configuration in your web server, but none of them are simple and often piss off your coworkers (or your girlfriend if you’re working at home).

That’s where Firefox Throttle comes to your rescue. I found this cool application on LifeHacker. It lets you configure a maximum speed for upload and download, allow or disallow bursts, and exclude IPs and web sites. My rating: 9/10.

3. Developer Bar (IE)

This is a kind of Firefox Web Developer Clone. While less complete, the IE Developer Bar it still contains the major features, such as cache disabling and DOM exploring. My rating: 9 on 10.

2. Firebug (Firefox)

Firebug is an evil tool. It provides DOM browsing functionnality, network monitoring that shows you organic and JavaScript made HTTP requests, more complete JavaScript debugging.

The only down side is: the plugin uses a lot of memory over time. If I leave my browser open for 3 days with 20 tabs, it end up using 1 Gig of RAM, so I can’t give it a perfect score. My rating: 9.5 on 10.

1. Web Developer Tool Bar (Firefox)

Most of you guys already know about Firefox’s Web Developer toolbar. It allows you, most of the time in one or two clicks to disable caching, CSS, and JavaScript; to show form information, fill them with dummy yet valid data; visually browser through your HTML elements; resize your browser to mimic given resolution; and view JavaScript generate source (through DOM or document.writes). My rating: 11 on 10.

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