Using Firebug to Improve your Web Design Skills

Have you ever come across a beautifully designed website and wished you had X-ray vision to see how all those HTML elements on the site work? Have you ever wanted to see how a certain design might look on your site without actually changing the underlying code? Well, you don’t have to wish or think anymore because a powerful and really useful browser extension called Firebug can help you do all that. Any designer or developer looking to experiment with different styles on a website in real-time needs this tool.

Firebug allows users to inspect <div> tags and change their attribute values. Any change made to the code is immediately visible on the browser window. Firebug works by allowing a user to either click on the browser window elements directly, which in turn, highlights the code that renders the element, or click on the code which highlights the browser elements. This is a useful functionality that allows a user to visualize and resolve float problems and padding or margin issues by simply changing the numeric values or properties associated with those elements.