Firefox is great, but the built in page source view is just so-so. I decided that I wanted to use Programmer’s Notepad (awesome freeware utility by the way) to view and edit generated page source with Firefox. With IE you can change your default page source editor and viewer from the Internet Properties>Programs tab. That is, if it’s been entered into your registry so that it’s on the list of HTML editors.

With Firefox the process is s a little more simple in that you can make the changes from your about:config file:

“If you want to view the HTML source of a web page using an external text editor instead of the built-in source viewer in Firefox, use about:config to set view_source.editor.external to true, and then set view_source.editor.path to e.g. C:\Windows\Notepad.exe or whatever is your preferred text editor.”

If you use the excellent Firefox extension Web Developer then you’ve also got a way to add several other programs for specific purposes. For instance, if you wanted to use Top Style Lite for checking out CSS and the afore mentioned Programmer’s Notepad for PHP and ASP, but not HTML or JS files.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Firefox, Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.