JSONView: View JSON Data in Firefox

JSON is a popular way to format AJAX responses, as it’s more compact than XML and essentially a JavaScript object, but it can be a real pain to work with due to uncooperative browsers. It’s easy enough to view XML in a web browser, which is good for testing, but JSON responses cause a download prompt to open. This makes it harder to verify that an AJAX request is working properly.

Fortunately, a clever developer has built a Firefox extension to solve this problem. JSONView renders a plain-text representation of the JSON object, complete with indentation and color-coding whenever you access a URL that outputs JSON data. For example, the Twitter API. If you click this link in Firefox, you will be prompted to download the file. With JSONView installed, you would see output from the following image.

If you do much JavaScript work, be sure to install JSONView. It will save you some headaches when you have AJAX requests that aren’t working quite right.