40+ Desert Island Web Development Tools

What would you do if you were suddenly stranded on a desert island in the middle of nowhere, with only a USB drive, a dial-up internet connection, and a barebones computer with no software outside the operating system installed? Of course, you’d use the internet connection to call for help first, but what about after that? How would you keep your design business going?

Portable Firefox

Portable Firefox is the portable edition of Mozilla Firefox. It’s a great app to take with you for working on other people’s computers, as you can store and access your own bookmarks, passwords, and preferences. The portable edition doesn’t leave anything behind on the computer you’re using, so you can be secure in saving your passwords and other information. It even appears to work with any extensions you install. It’s a PortableApps.com app, so it’s only available for Windows machines.

Portable Firefox

Don’t forget if you’re using Portable Firefox to also make sure you’ve downloaded some of the useful web development add-ons available.

  • Firebug – For viewing and on-page editing of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • CSS Viewer – A basic CSS property viewer.
  • HTML Validator – An HTML validator toolbar for Firefox.
  • Web Developer – Adds a menu and toolbar with various tools for web developers.
  • CodeBurner – An HTML and CSS reference guide built into Firefox.

Instant Rails

Instant Rails is a Ruby runtime solution with Ruby on Rails, Apache and MySQL, all ready to run. All you have to do is put it in the directory you choose and run it; there are no installation files.

Instant Rails

Server2Go

Server2Go is a server package available with a variety of different configurations. There are packages that include Apache, PHP and SQLite; Apache, PHP, SQLite, and MySQL; Apache, PHP, SQLite, MySQL, and Perl; as well as mini packages (with only the needed files) and a “plain vanilla” package that doesn’t include PHP, Perl, or MySQL).

Portable Chrome

Portable Chrome is the portable vesion of Google’s Chrome browser. It includes all the features of the regular Chrome browser, including better stability and speed, tabbed browsing, and search right from the address bar.

Portable Chrome

Opera@USB

Opera@USB is a portable version of the Opera web browser. It’s very similar to the desktop version, though the differences aren’t expounded upon in the documentation for the app. The full version (and presumably the portable version) includes tabbed browsing, a password manager, an inline spell checker, and support for savable browsing sessions.

Opera USB

MoWeS Portable

MoWeS Portable is a portable web server for Windows. It’s been tested on Windows 98 through Vista. It’s free and released under the GNU/GPL license. The server is based on Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The biggest difference between MoWeS and many other portable server packages is that you can download MoWeS preconfigured with a variety of software options, including TYPO3, WordPress, PHPMyAdmin, OS Commerce, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla!, and others.

MoWeS Portable