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.