MeasureIt

Firefox fans know that one of the best things about Mozilla's free browser is the huge range of add-ons available for it. Some do Big Important Things, like Internet security or personal time management. Others do Small Useful Things, such as MeasureIt, which measures it, when "it" is a Web page. When it's active, this free Firefox extension displays the width and height in pixels of any part of a Firefox page.

Like most Firefox add-ons, MeasureIt installed automatically, placing a small Ruler icon in the browser's lower left edge. The Firefox add-ons page let us enable or disable MeasureIt, but there are no other options. However, MeasureIt is simplicity itself to use. We browsed to a Web page and clicked the Ruler icon. Firefox's display window became semitransparent, and MeasureIt's selection cursor, a large plus sign, appeared in the center of the page. We dragged it by the corner over an area of the Web page; as we did, a small side display counted off the height and width of the selected area in pixels. Clicking the X on the pixel display panel closed the current selection but left MeasureIt's selection icon active and the page grayed out. Clicking the Ruler toolbar icon toggled the program off and changed the icon from yellow to gray.

MeasureIt performed flawlessly in its simple but useful mission, but there's certainly room for improvement. The one thing we'd really like to see is an option to close the program from the selection box. A Copy or Save option would be nice, too, and perhaps a choice of other measurement units. We certainly don't advocate hanging bells and whistles on an efficient tool like this one, though.