19 Chrome extensions for designers
Google Chrome is without a doubt the most popular browser in the world. In terms of user share, Google Chrome is well ahead of other major browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, and more. In just 10 years, Google Chrome has managed to gain over 65% of the market share. One of the key factors behind its meteoric rise is the huge library of extensions that truly sets it apart from the rest, especially for web designers and developers. However, with such a vast library of extensions, it becomes a bit of a hassle to choose extensions for your day-to-day needs.
This article highlights the 19 best Chrome extensions for web developers and designers to improve their productivity and make their life easier.
ColorZilla is one of the oldest color picker extensions launched over 8 years ago, and it has successfully maintained its role as the best color picker and eyedropper extension for Chrome for developers or designers even today. ColorZilla allows you to grab color from any pixel in the browser on the fly and paste it into any other program in RGB HEX format. Just like the site palette, ColorZilla also lets you create gradient colors and pull color palettes from any website. The extension also maintains a history of recently selected colors.
The next time you come across a website with a beautiful and pleasing color combination, this ingenious plugin can help you quickly extract and generate a color palette. It also allows you to download preview palette images and create public links. The site palette is armed with seamless integration with coolers.co and Google Art Pallete.
Font Face Ninja makes it easy to identify all fonts used on a web page. Boasting over 280,000 downloads, Font Face Ninja is a direct competitor to another popular extension called WhatFont. To use this Chrome extension for developers and designers, you just need to hover over any text element on the web page that you need to identify. The popup will display the font name along with a small preview window. You can tag your favorite fonts and save them for later use.
Web designers and developers may find it necessary to take snapshots of their codes in their projects for aesthetics or presentation purposes. Marmoset is a brilliant Chrome extension that lets you create beautiful code snapshots in seconds with just one click. This can come in handy for social media posts or portfolio websites. This is one of the must-have Chrome extensions for web developers and designers.
LambdaTest came up with a Chrome extension to help the user perform automated screenshot testing. You can test screenshots on 25 devices at one time. If you find any UI anomaly, you can share it with your colleagues in your preferred project management tool. Providing you with the ability to do cross-browser testing in an instant, Lambdatest Screenshot is definitely one of the best Chrome extensions for developers, designers and obviously testers around the world.
Page Ruler is one of the most important and useful Chrome extensions for developers and designers on the list, which helps web developers quickly measure the pixel dimensions and positioning of any element on a page. This extension draws a ruler image on the screen that allows you to inspect individual elements and view their size readings – width, height, plus positioning.
Another key extension in this category is called Dimensions, which helps measure the distances between various elements on a web page. Its functioning is slightly different from the page ruler. Dimensions measures the distance from the mouse pointer up / down and left / right until it reaches a border. This makes it an ideal tool for measuring distances between images, input fields, buttons, videos, GIFs, text, icons. Another feature that sets the dimensions apart is its ability to work with layouts, and also if your designer handed you Jpeg or PNG page design layouts, put them in Chrome and the dimensions will work without a hitch. One thing to note about sizing is that it may not always work well with images.
Check My Links is arguably the most powerful and reliable broken link checker Chrome extension for developers and designers in the Chrome library. It scans the entire web page and checks every single link and reports whether it is valid or not. The extension gives you the ability to copy every broken link to your clipboard with just one click. Identifying and fixing broken links is critical to any website for effective on-page SEO and avoiding penalties from Google site crawlers.
The Clear Cache extension helps you clear your cache along with your browsing data with one click, without wasting time on pop-ups, dialog boxes or Chrome preferences. Plus, you can even customize how much data you want to clear in the extension option settings – App Cache, Cache, Cookies, Downloads, File Systems, Form Data, History, Indexed DB, Local Storage, Plugin Data, Passwords, and WebSQL. You can delete cookies globally or for specific domains. One of the most user-friendly Chrome extensions for developers, designers, and everyone else too.
One of the biggest hurdles that developers face when faced with the impressive face of a website is the intriguing question – What technologies were used to create this website? This is where Wappalyzer comes to the rescue. This amazing extension is a cross-platform tool created by Elbert Alias in 2009 that reveals the technologies used to build a specific website. It automatically detects over 1000 technologies such as site generators, frameworks, libraries, plugins, CMS, databases, server software, widgets, analytics tools, etc. You can use Wappalyzer website or use an extension for quick use. This Chrome extension for developers and designers has become a lifesaver for creating engaging websites.
Ghostery is a privacy extension with a built-in ad blocker to eliminate annoying ads from a website, protect against tracking, protect your data and block third-party website from tracking, along with a page speed accelerator and optimizer to make your browsing experience concise and enjoyable. … It also comes with a custom dashboard inside that can be configured to view related information.
If you are actively working with APIs, especially RestFul API or something that includes a ton of JSON data, this visually stunning JSON highlighter serves as a great target as a Chrome extension for developers. Instead of viewing huge JSON file data in a clumsy, unreadable format in your browser, the JSON viewer helps you organize your JSON data in a visually appealing tree format that can be viewed directly in the browser window.
This extension is a lifesaver for responsive design coding. While most developers are satisfied with the default Chrome tools resizing feature, this Chrome extension for developers and designers can simulate any screen size and resolution of all popular devices like iPhones, iPad, etc. It is very useful for developers to test their layouts on different screen size devices and check if their adaptive media request encoding is working as intended or not.
Another of the most useful Chrome extensions for developers and designers. Instead of using the usual standard lorem ipsum generators to generate placeholder text in your web layouts, why not try this smart tool that generates smart text, not gibberish content. Ipsum Enterprise Extension is a special kind of lorem ipsum generator that generates business content text layout. This will make your layouts more visually appealing and presentable to clients.
Google Chrome is notorious around the world for its huge appetite for RAM usage, and developers with slower systems are constantly experiencing screen freezes and crashes when working with multiple tabs. This is why effective tab management is indispensable, especially when you lose track of the tabs you ve opened looking for design inspiration or hashing a solution on StackOverflow. The perfect tool for this giant challenge is Sessions Buddy! Sessions Buddy is the most powerful Chrome extension for developers and designers to help them manage browser tabs. It also offers a bookmark manager with a simple and beautiful interface. This will help you save sessions and restore them later when you open them on the fly. Therefore, avoiding clutter and keeping memory free. It allows you to manage all your tabs on one page, organize them by topic, and also offers a quick search to find a specific tab. Plus, you don t have to worry about losing your session if you accidentally close your browser window or your system crashes.
Instead of wasting time looking for an element s CSS properties in an inspector or source window, the CSS Viewer extension extracts all of the valuable CSS properties and displays them in an organized way inside a floating window. Just hover your mouse over any element on the web page you want to inspect and the floating CSS viewer will display all the key CSS properties.
EditThisCookie is the most popular cookie manager extension in the Chrome library with over 2.7 million users, making it the undisputed king when it comes to cookies. This tool allows you to add, remove, search, edit, block and protect (read-only) cookies. Moreover, you can also import cookies in JSON or cookies txt formats. This Chrome extension is one of the most useful Chrome extensions for developers and designers.
Checkbot is an award winning extension that allows you to simultaneously check over 250 URLs on a site to check SEO / website speed / security issues like broken links, redirects, invalid HTML / CSS / JS, insecure password form, minify files , duplicate content, etc. Checkbot runs tests based on 50+ SEO and security best practices based on guidelines from Google, Mozilla, and W3C. using the Checkbot extension will help you create perfectly optimized and secure websites that will kill Google SERP rankings. SERP ranking is critical for every online business, as a developer you strive to provide a beautiful website, but what good would it be if it didn t have the proper attention it deserves?
An indispensable Chrome extension for developers and designers, this extension adds a toolbar with a complete set of web development in the browser. The tools offered by this extension are divided into 10 separate tabs – Disable, Cookies, CSS, Forms, Images, Information, Miscellaneous, Outline, Resize, and Tools.
These tools include disabling javascript / plugins / popups / notifications, cookie manager, CSS property viewer and editor, form and image manipulation, window resizing, cache management, page ruler, property inspector, etc.
Source: LambdaTest
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