FireFox FireBug Plugins
I’ve mentioned my fondness for FireFox FireBug before so when I read about the 5 Best FireBug Plugins I knew I had to share the news. It seems FireBug is popular enough to warrant its own subset of “plugins” or “extensions”. Nifty.
Out of the 5 available plugins:
- YSlow: Creates a report grading the speed of any site.
- FireCookie: Lets you inspect and modify the cookies a site is using.
- FirePHP: A PHP Debugging tool used to examine PHP header data.
- PixelPerfect:Overlays a transparent image guide to help tweak CSS.
- Rainbow: Color coding for scripts inside FireBug.
I found YSlow from Yahoo! to be the most interesting. YSlow uses 13 rules to grade your page’s performance and presents the results in a well-formatted series of tabbed views. When combined with the information found in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for High Performance Web Sites this FireBug plugin will definitely help you understand why your page is loading slowly.
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Anyone signed up and used FirePHP? Looks interesting.
It might not be “possible” but it’s probably easier than getting all of the plugin authors to agree on any one solution. 😉
Please be sure to let me know how well your modifications work, I’m definitely curious to know the results.
I’m not sure if that would be possible. I think the easiest way would be if all PlugIn authors who are using extra JavaScript or CSS files add an option to their PlugIn that the user can decide if the PlugIn’s default JS and CSS is loaded or if it should ignore them . Then the user could unite all JS and CSS into one file. Of course that would still mean that the user has to update his files if a PlugIns JS or CSS has changed by an update. Although CSS files are less prone to have being updated.
I’ve merged most of the CSS files from PlugIns into one file but my site is still loading 14 JavaScript files on the index page. I guess I will soon merge them together anyway. I think my site has become noticeably slower.
@Sascha, I understand what you’re saying.
I wonder if a WordPress plugin could read the head content, identify and remove JS and CSS file references and then create 1 JS and 1 CSS file stored somewhere where it won’t be overwritten and can be referenced later.
The general idea sounds easy but I guess the details would probably make it too difficult or slow.
Yeap, YSlow can be very helpful. The problem we got with WordPress whatsoever is that many plugins are loading many JavaScript and CSS files which according to YSlow is the first reason why a website loads slow (many HTTP requests). Conclusive it would be wise to put all CSS into one and all JavaScript into another single file. The only obstacle is that when plugins update they will overwrite your modifications and you have to modify them all over again.