Developers have lots of choices when it comes to what tools they choose to use to aid their online development efforts.
Browsers, multimedia applications like Photoshop and text-editors are all part of the toolbox developers can choose from. Developer.com details the results of a Mozilla-sponsored survey of over 5,000 developers that shows why many favor Firefox and what other browsers are in the mix.
For many users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web.
This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5,054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox — and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing.
The survey found that the chief reason for Firefox’s popularity as a developer tool is its large ecosystem of Web development add-ons. Almost 90 percent of those polled cited Firefox’s developer-centric add-ons as being central to their Web development efforts — ahead of text editors (approximately 65 percent) ; graphics applications like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or the open source Gimp (about 45 percent); and tools like Eclipse, IE8 Developer Tools, Safari Inspector, Dreamweaver and Flash, all of which came in at under 30 percent usage.
