This week I want to discuss browser stuff, an impulse driven by, you guessed it, Google's release of the Chrome Web browser.

Before I discuss Chrome let me digress to talk about Firefox 3. FF3 has been out in full release for a couple of months and to stick with any other browser you would have to be, in my humble opinion, either nontechnical or a committed masochist.

Sure, other browsers have their strengths, but if you want a browser that is fast, mostly standards-based, open source (which is a huge issue), cross platform, extensible and mostly well-behaved, then Firefox is the best, and some might argue, the only choice. But the thing that really sets Firefox 3 apart for us geeks is all the amazing developer add-ons available. If you haven't checked what's available in this category let me introduce you to a few of my leetle friends.

First up is the DOM Inspector. If you want to really explore and understand how modern Web pages are built you absolutely need this Firefox add-on.

DOM Inspector can be used to inspect and edit a live Document Object Model. You've most likely read about the DOM before but in case you forget (also a digression – that's three stack pushes so far), it is an object-oriented interface to the structure of an HTML document or XUL application.

You know what an HTML document is but maybe XUL is less familiar, so one more digression (another stack push): XUL is an XML user interface markup language that came out of the Mozilla Project. XUL is a pretty big topic that I don't have the space to cover here, and as it isn’t a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard and applies only to browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine, we'll defer the topic for another column. (Stack pop).

The DOM is really important because it allows scripts and other processing systems to understand and manipulate the content of downloaded Web pages. A trivial example of this would be to use, say, JavaScript to dynamically change the color scheme of a page by finding and modifying all HTML elements that define the page background and text colors.

Yet another digression (stack push number four): Check out Greasemonkey, yet another Firefox add-on that allows the manipulation of selected Web pages through the DOM using JavaScript.