A good friend of mine, Vid Luther from PHPCult / Linuxpowered.com, showed me Selenium, a nifty Firefox extension, today for developing test cases that you can play back into the Firefox browser including pauses, delays, keystrokes, form values, and link clicks.

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

If you find yourself repeatedly running the same user flow tests on a website or web application, try out this extension today!

So you may have found this post by scrummaging through countless search engine results on how to test your regular expression code. By the way, in case you’re not familiar with Regular Expressions, you may find this wikipedia article helpful.

I’ve searched for many quick and easy tools that are free from a coding environment and haven’t had much luck with that hunt, until recently. I stumbled upon the Regular Expression Tester Extension for Firefox. I’ve found it helpful and intuitive in helping me design and debug my regular expressions for .Net applications, PHP applications and more applications.

Ok so by now you probably think I’m in love with Firefox, but you’re wrong. Although I must admit I’m getting there gradually. The extensions that Firefox coders are adding on are superb and deserve recognition.

Take ColorfulTabs for example. Along with the 3D Rotating tab flipping that I posted about previously, this one surely adds an extra visual indication and very helpful if you have a multitude of tabs in your browser.

If you like to see visually slick animations in your web surfing experience you might find this Firefox extension very cool.

It works well and doesn’t eat up many CPU cycles, unlike some OS’s that we sometimes hate.

After setting up multiple Google Apps domains / mail accounts to use with Firefox’s great tabbing feature, I discovered Firefox was using more memory on my PC (300MB+ out of 2GB RAM). I found one particular blog post from last year on blogspot.

They suggest tweaking the about:config page of Firefox which gives you access to every config property and more in Firefox. So far I haven’t seen a major improvement in memory footprint for Firefox, but I definitely see a speed improvement.

If you try it out and have different results or know of any other ideas, please leave a comment.

If you have multiple email accounts and/or Google Apps domains, I suggest you immediately install the Gmail Manager. It will alert you when you get new mail for any of your accounts. It’s unobtrusive and doesn’t clog up your task bar (XP).

Find out more and install Gmail Manager Firefox add-on now