As a web developer with over 10 years of experience testing websites and applications on over 3500+ real device and browser combinations, I get asked daily – what are the killer Chrome extensions that can boost my productivity?
Well my friend, you‘ve come to the right place! In this comprehensive guide, I will be sharing my secret sauce – the 18 most useful Chrome extensions for web developers in 2024. These tools will help you work smarter, enable blazing fast testing, improve collaboration and even make you a better coder!
Why Choose Chrome and its Extensions?
Before we jump into the extensions, let me give you some context on why Chrome and its extensions are a web developer‘s best friend:
Chrome has Been the Undisputed Browser Leader for Years
As per StatCounter‘s April 2023 data, Chrome has a dominant 66% worldwide browser market share. This trend has held steady for several years now:
| Year | Chrome Market Share |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 64.96% |
| 2020 | 65.38% |
| 2021 | 64.91% |
| 2022 | 65.59% |
This growth is driven by Chrome‘s blazing fast performance, rapid feature updates, seamless sync across devices, top-notch security, and most importantly – the power of extensions!
Extensions Give Chrome Added Superpowers!
Chrome offers an extensive library of extensions (over 200,000+) that can help customize and optimize your workflows.
As developers, we spend a big chunk of our day testing sites, writing code, checking responsiveness across devices, collaborating with teams etc – all using the browser.
This is where the extensions come into play – helping automate repetitive tasks, improving workflows and boosting productivity. And Chrome‘s powerful architecture makes adding these custom extensions easy!
Now that you know why Chrome and extensions are important, let me reveal my top extension arsenal!
Top 18 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Web Developers
These Chrome extensions help accelerate development workflows, improve collaboration, enable faster testing and make you a smarter coder!
1. Window Resizer
Usage: Responsiveness Testing Across Devices
Testing sites across varying screen sizes is critical before deployment. Window Resizer allows you to resize Chrome to mimic sizes for different devices like mobiles, tablets and desktops.
Key Features:
- Support for standard device sizes – iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, iPad, Surface Duo etc.
- Option to save and import custom sizes
- Shortcuts to quickly toggle sizes
- Resizing preserves browser zoom level
This takes the pain out of responsiveness testing across hundreds of real devices. It helps catch layout or scaling issues early without needing access to an extensive device lab like I have!
2. BrowserStack
Usage: Cross Browser Testing
While Window Resizer tests responsiveness, BrowserStack focuses on cross-browser testing. It lets you test your sites across 3000+ real browser and operating system environments.
You get access to a cloud hosted device lab that executes tests across browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and IE versions.
Key Highlights:
- Access to real mobile and desktop browsers – no emulators
- Test on localized OS versions – Windows 10, macOS Ventura etc
- Launch test sessions with a click
- Support for automation scripts
- Shared step-by-step test reports
The free plan offers limited monthly testing minutes. But the premium plans provide capabilities like testing local sites, automation integration etc. – making it very worthwhile for teams.
3. ColorZilla
Usage: Color Picker, Palette Building, Gradient Analysis
As developers, we often need to pick colors from sites to maintain visual consistency in our UI themes. ColorZilla makes that a breeze with its color picker, eyedropper tool and palette builder.
You can even extract complex CSS gradients from sites and analyze properties like RGB/HEX values, transparency etc. It reduces style sheet debugging effort.
Standout Features:
- Multi-point gradient color picker
- Color palette generator
- Color analyzer for CSS gradients
- Supports RGB, HEX, HSL formats
- History of recently picked colors
Overall, a huge time saver for quickly building color palettes and streamlining style sheet authoring.
4. WhatFont
Usage: Identify Font Properties
WhatFont enables instant identification of font families from sites through its hover interface. Just hover over any text portion and it accurately detects:
- Font family/typeface
- Font size
- Font weight
- Letter casing
- Line height
This handy tool comes in super useful when you want to legally embed commercial fonts used in sites you are building.
It also helps speed up debugging typography and font stacking issues by revealing the exact fonts used.
5. Check My Links
Usage: Finding Broken Links
While building sites, developers often lose track of broken links that creep in and can impact site reputation.
Check My Links solves that problem by crawling pages and clearly reporting:
- Broken links
- Valid links
- Redirected URLs
The detailed reports even showcase full redirect chains. You can also export results to monitor link improvements over successive builds.
It helps maintain site health by reducing the risk of bots hitting 404 pages unexpectedly. This protects site traffic and SEO standing.
6. Web Developer
Usage: Augmented Inspection & Debugging
This aptly named extension adds a toolbar packed with handy web developer tools for augmented inspection and debugging.
It has a range of powerful options like:
- Viewing complete CSS styles applied
- Disabling JavaScript execution
- Analyzing resource loading
- Blocking requests
- Tracking storage usage
Specifically for images, it can selectively block images, replace them and even analyze dimensions.
It also has excellent responsiveness testing tools that help override CSS with custom rules. This comes handy when experimenting with quick style or layout changes.
Overall it‘s an indispensable tool I always recommend for developers!
7. CSS/JS Code Beautifier
Usage: Beautifying and Refactoring Code
When inspecting source code or working with style sheets/script files, Code Beautifier transforms jumbled code into properly indented, easy to read structures.
It makes refactoring legacy web apps or sites built with code generators more manageable by structuring code.
Nifty Capabilities:
- Beautification for CSS, JavaScript and JSON files
- Customizable indentation rules
- Option to minify code for production use
- Transforming minified code into human readable form
- Converting CSS files into minified CSS
The beautification and conversions accelerate style and functionality debugging – making it a valuable tool.
8. JSON Viewer
Usage: Formatting and Inspecting API Data
When testing sites that rely on REST APIs and external data sources, analyzing raw JSON responses can difficult.
This is where JSON Viewer comes into play – it takes unstructured JSON and converts it into an easy to navigate, collapsible tree format within Chrome.
Beneficial Features:
- Folding structure for easy inspection
- Find nodes with text search
- Copying parts of responses
- Collapsing sub-trees
- Color coding for depth
- Works across developer tools
If you work with JavaScript heavy apps dealing with external data, this one is a must-have in your toolbox!
9. Session Buddy
Usage: Session Manager and Tab Recovery
Juggling multiple research tabs, references and tools is a common scenario for developers. Session Buddy solves the headache of losing work saved in tabs.
It lets you logically group tabs into named session collections that can easily be restored later. You can organize sessions for specific tasks like testing particular site features, research topics etc.
Handy Highlights:
- Saves entire Chrome sessions for recovery
- Search works across all open and saved tabs
- Syncs saved tab collections across devices
- Import/export backup with one click
-HISTORY -6ms/+33ms
It enables quick resumption after interrupted work and has become an invaluable tool that protects me from losing precious browser work!
10. Site Palette
Usage: Color Scheme Extraction and Palette Generation
Having to manually build color palettes by sampling colors from sites being developed is time consuming.
Site Palette eliminates that effort through automatic color scheme extraction from sites – served up as downloadable PNG palettes!
It samples prominent colors from rendered pages including:
- Backgrounds
- Foregrounds
- Buttons
- Headings
- Body text
- Hyperlinks
The extracted harmonious schemes make stylistic theme building a lot quicker. It also enables visually consistent experience when adding new sections.
11. Wappalyzer
Usage: Identify Site Technologies and Services
When evaluating existing sites to understand their underlying tech stack, Wappalyzer reveals relevant details through browser icons.
It accurately detects all sorts of site technologies like:
- Platforms and frameworks
- Web servers
- JavaScript libraries
- Analytics and tracking services
- Widgets and plugins
- Content management systems
- Hosting providers and CDNs
Having this insight helps when comparing technology alternatives and aids decision making when considering new platforms.
It performs seamlessly without needing any complex installations – earning it a default spot in my testing toolkit.
12. React Developer Tools
Usage: Inspecting React Apps
When working with React based progressive web apps, the React Developer Tools prove invaluable for component inspection.
It neatly integrates into the Chrome DevTools without needing complex debugging setups allowing you to:
Key Capabilities:
- Visualize page React component hierarchies
- Inspect component props and state
- Filter components by name/location
- Force update tracing for degugging
- Analyzing granular performance metrics
The recursive component views make tracing UI rendering extremely easy. It eliminates tedious console logging and is fantastic for optimizing React performance.
13. Redux DevTools
Usage: Store Debugging for Redux Apps
In the same vein as React tools, Redux DevTools provides a central view for debugging Redux based state management instantly within Chrome.
The main timeline view visualizes every Redux data store transaction beautifully clearly showing:
- All state snapshots over time
- Action payloads for state changes
- Store instance details
- Re-rendering performance impact
The instant time traveling through application state makes tracing errors effortless without console instrumentation. If using Redux, this one tool will accelerate app building tremendously though real-time transaction inspection!
14. Angular DevTools
Usage: Granular Inspector for Angular Apps
Just like React and Redux tools do for those ecosystems, Angular DevTools provides seamless runtime application inspection without instrumentation hassles.
It neatly exposes an entire execution graph showing:
- Component trees
- Injectable services
- Routing states
- Debugging pipelines
- Performance tradeoffs
The extension works by plugging into real application states dynamically based on frameworks bindings. This makes it simple to adopt and yet provides a vastly superior debugging workflow.
15. VisBug
Usage: Live CSS Editing and Testing
VisBug makes it easy to visually test styles while building pages without needing complex dev setups.
You can interactively edit CSS properties live and view changes immediately. Properties like colors, dimensions, positioning etc can be tweaked visually right inside the browser.
It also has additional helper tools like:
- Screen rulers for overlays
- Guides and spacing helpers
- Color picker similar to ColorZilla
- Ability to save style rule tweaks across sessions
The mechanism for rapid visual iterations accelerates theme adjustments and style sheet authoring. You will love building layouts with real-time feedback!
16. Pesticide
Usage: CSS Layout Inspection
Ever faced scenarios where UI elements don‘t align as expected leading to broken looking pages? Pesticide solves this pesky CSS issue.
It highlights layout boundaries, padding and margins for all UI elements on rendered pages. This instantly shows visual issues with spacing or element alignment without needing measurement calculations.
Just like real pesticides kill bug infestations, this namesake extension helps crush CSS bugs that manifest as misaligned page sections! It cuts down tedious style debugging.
17. DotEnv
Usage: Environment Variable Integration
When building full stack web apps, developers often run into ‘.env‘ configuration issues that break functionality in staging or production sites.
DotEnv solves this by loading remote .env files and injecting variables straight into Chrome contexts seamlessly.
It works by extending native environment handling for:
- API endpoints
- Assets and resources
- Feature flags and settings
- External service credentials
With consistent environment parity, you don‘t have to worry about local UI and API calls breaking! This eliminates fragile context switching.
18. Git History Browser Extension
Usage: Correlating Code Evolution to UI Changes
When attempting to correlate UI changes to code commits during testing, this extension makes it effortless by integrating file revision change logs visually right within Chrome inspector tools.
It adds a ‘Revisions‘ panel showing:
- All commits for the site repository
- Timestamped change logs
- File structure indicates changed paths
- View diffs between commit versions
This bridges the gap between implementation history and visible outcomes – making recent change isolation and debugging quicker!
Level Up Your Productivity with These Handy Tools!
So there you have it friend – my ultimate guide to the 18 most useful Chrome extensions that every web developer should have installed!
All these tools help accelerate workflows, improve visibility, provide smarter debugging channels and enable faster testing cycles.
They are backed by an extensive research effort spanning over 10 years and testing on thousands of browser and device versions I have built up in my lab!
The specific capabilities unconstrained access provides and workflow innovation fueled drives me to stay at the cutting edge and continually expand my repertoire.
I hope this guide acted as window for you into some lesser known but extremely effective Chrome extensions that can greatly optimize and even transform your website and web app development practices!
Let me know which extensions worked best for your needs. I am always keen to learn from fellow developers and refine my recommendations.
Happy testing and building!
