Have you ever wanted to capture the whole web page you are viewing in your web browser as an image ? If you are using Firefox as your web browser, you are in luck. Firefox has a number of freely available extensions which allow you to capture screens of the visiting web page.

You can capture a part, the visible portion of the web page or the whole web page using these screen capture tools/add-ons/extensions. Firefox web browser has a number of extensions which make it child’s play to take screenshots. The following are some of the more popular ones.

Screen Grab –  This Firefox extension allows you to capture a portion of a website or the whole website and save it as PNG or JPEG file. Screen Grab is an  ideal tool if your needs are simple, and the acquired screenshot does not need any further manipulation.

Capture a web page using Screen Grab

FireShot – This is a more advanced screenshot tool. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers. This extension is available as a Free version and, a Pro version which has additional functionality but costs $35. You can try out the FireShot Pro Screen Capture for 30 days, after which it reverts back to the free version if you choose not to pay for it.

Fireshot Pro has a useful editor which provides tools to embellish your screenshots.

Abduction –   To take a webshot, after installing this extension , visit the web site whose screenshot you need to take and right-click anywhere on it and click on “Save Image As” menu. This is a rather non-intuitive but quite useful Firefox extension. Non-intuitive  because the user actually has to figure out how to use this extension. I figured it out only after reading the description on the  web site. The plus side is that it allows you to save the corresponding image in both low resolution and high resolution JPEG / PNG file formats respectively.

Quite useful but less intuitive

Pixlr – This is a versatile tool which can be used to capture screens and images of websites. Grab the entire page, visible part or select area your self. Right click any photo or background and edit them in a advanced image editor. Advantage of Pixlr is that the captured image is opened in it’s own versatile online editor where you can modify it further. You don’t need an off-line image editor.

Steps to use Pixlr in Firefox

The image is opened in the online Pixlr image editor.

Aviary Talon – This is a Firefox extension which tightly integrates with all the tools in the Aviary online graphics suite. Once installed, you can use this extension to take screenshots of regions or whole web pages. Once you have captured the web page, Aviary Talon provides options to copy the capture on to a clipboard, save it to your hard disk or open it in the Aviary graphics editor for further manipulation.

Capture screenshot of websites using Talon Firefox extension

Aviary Talon is a very impressive tool indeed. Here is another neat trick from Aviary. If you want to capture a web page, you append the web page to the aviary.com domain name in your web browser and Aviary will automatically capture it for you and open it in its graphics editor for further editing.

While these five Firefox extensions are quite popular, there are a couple more extensions which are gaining prominence. They have not been listed here because they are still in the experimental stage. So the next time you want to take a screenshot or screen capture a website, you know where to start looking.