Sometimes updating and uploading a website can be a nightmare of multi-window confusion.
You can quite easily find yourself swapping between any number of open applications (and instances of) as you edit your pages in your authoring program (such as Dreamweaver) in one window, test locally in one browser window, upload edits with your FTP program in another and test the remote uploaded results in yet another browser window. (That's ignoring validation and accessibility testing which may well also (and should) be part of your work flow.)

Thankfully if you are a Firefox user, there is a gem of a plug-in available for the program that streamlines our web design process considerably. (Firefox 3rd party developers, to the rescue yet again!)

Fire FTP is a fantastically simple, secure and intuitive FTP client available as a plug-in for Firefox, which gives you the ability to FTP from right inside the browser.

Why is this so great?

Well if you also take into consideration Firefox's tried and tested tabbed browsing method, having an FTP app built in is a dream. It means that using separate tabs, we can have the local testing version of a page, our FTP client and the remote uploaded version of a page all open in one instance of Firefox at he same time!

We can test in one tab, upload in the next and then test remote results to our changes in the next tab!

You could even take it a step further by installing a validator and accessibility testing plug-in also available for Firefox, but that's a story for another blog...