32 Google Chrome Extensions For Smart Designers
Valters Bergspics
Google chrome is a relatively new web browser but it has already gained huge popularity with its great speed and features. Web developers must work more faster and more productively – what could help more than these extensions aimed to ease your daily development process and save time.
At least for me – none of extensions have made browser load speed slower – I cannot say this about Firefox though, which I don’t use anymore. Scroll through this list – I am sure you will find at least few new extensions to use daily!
1. FireBug Lite
I hope we all know FireBug addon for FireFox, so here is the same extension but only for Chrome. Firebug Lite is a tool for web developers, that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
2. Resolution Test
Resolution Test changes the size of the browser window for web developers to preview websites in different screen resolutions. It includes a list of commonly used resolutions as well as a custom option for you to input your own.
3. Speed Tracer
Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).
Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by:
- Javascript parsing and execution
- Layout
- CSS style recalculation and selector matching
- DOM Event handling
- Network resource loading
- Timer fires
- XMLHttpRequest callbacks
- Painting
- and more …
4. Web Developer
The Web Developer extension adds a toolbar button to the browser with various web developer tools. This is the official port of the popular Web Developer extension for Firefox written by the same person.
5. Pendule
Use this extension in addition to the built-in Developer Tools. This tool is so similar to FireBug. You can just press mouse button and inspect the element.
6. Aviary Screen Capture
Take a screenshot of any webpage and edit it directly in your browser with Aviary.com applications. Plus convenient access to the Aviary website and tools.
Features:
- Save to desktop, host online, or edit in other Aviary apps.
- Captures instantly.
- Screen capture of the visible portion of all web pages and images.
- Add visual notes like arrows, text and highlights to your capture.
- Crop your capture.
- Resize, rotate and flip your capture.
- Smart select and move of captured elements.
- Grab color information from the page.
- Quick launch 6 Aviary design tools: Image editor, markup editor, vector editor, color palette editor, effects editor & audio editor.
7. Chrome Web Developer Tools
This extensions developers are trying to get this as close as possible to “FireFox Web Developer” addon. This extension made easy the web development.
8. Chrome Sniffer
Chrome Sniffer will help web developer to inspect web framework / CMS and javascript library running on current browsing website. An icon will appear on address bar indicates the detected framework. Great way to know what source site is using (if source is opensource and it is popular).
9. Lorem Ipsum Generator
It generates random “Lorem Ipsum” text, it allows to choose words per paragraph and number of paragraphs.
10. PlainClothes
Unstyle the web with this tool. PlainClothes makes everything as possible closer to default or your wanted style. Just imagine – text is black, backgrounds are white, unread links are blue, visited links are purple, all links are underlined or any other colors you like. And all text is rendered in your default fonts (as defined in “Options” > “Under the Hood” > “Change font and language settings”). Everywhere. Automatically.
This is how 1stwebdesigner.com looks using this tool:
11. Internet Explorer Tab
Internet Explorer Tab shows IE in Google Chrome. Very simple extension. I think it’s very useful to not to use IE.
12. Chrome SEO
The Google Chrome SEO Extension provides easy access to Search Engine Optimization Tools that can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other daily SEO tasks.
13. SEO Site Tools
It validates CSS and HTML, displays server software, checks for gzip compression, page headers and shares even more on-page suggestions based on accepted SEO knowledge. It can disable right-click scripts, and does window resizing to see where fold would be on different size monitors. Fast clean simple UI with a wealth of SEO information makes doing a quick consult fast and easy.
14. META SEO Inspector
Meta data is not just the usual HTML meta tags, but the XFN tags, various microformats, the recently introduced canonical attribute, the no-follow links and so on.
15. Validity
Validity can be used to quickly validate your HTML documents from the address bar.
Just click the icon in the address bar to validate the current document without leaving the page. The number of validation errors can be seen in the tool tip.
Validity also gives you the option to use your own installation of the W3C Validation Service. (For more information on installing the W3C Validation Service see the documentation at http://validator.w3.org/docs/install.html).
16. Eye Dropper
Eye Dropper and Color Picker extension which allows you to pick color from any webpage or from advanced color picker.
17. Color Picker
Quickly get the Hex and RGB values of any color! Also adjust Hue, Saturation, and Balance.
18. Image Cropper
This extension help you to crop any images on the fly.
It’s especially useful when you need to crop your online album photo for IM thumbnail.
- Crop images in img html element
- Crop css background images for any html element
- Cropped Image is in PNG format
- Right click on top of the selection to “save as” the cropped image.
19. Webpage Screenshot
Makes screenshot of whole page even if page is very long.
20. Picnik
The Picnik Extension for Chrome lets you easily edit the images you come across while browsing the web. With a click you can create a snapshot of your current web page and open it in Picnik for easy editing, annotation and sharing. Do the same for all the image on the current page — just pick the image from the dynamic hot list and then edit, annotate and share with Picnik. It is a great replacement to PhotoShop!
21. MeasureIt!
Draw out a ruler that will help you get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.
22. Pixlr Grabber
Grab visible screen, select part or entire page. Share screen to Pixlr imm.io, edit screen in Pixlr editor or save to desktop. This is one of the few who can capture the entire screen, however since Chrome just supports canvas in png the images created gets quite large and takes a while to process.
23. Domain Availability Checker
Quickly check if domain name is already taken or not.
24. Snippy
Snippy allows you to grab snippets of web pages, save them for future use and upload them to Google Docs.
25. FlashBlock
Flashblock is an extension for the Google Chrome that blocks all Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.
26. BuiltWith Technology Profiler
BuiltWith is a web site profiler tool. Upon looking up a page, BuiltWith returns all the technologies it can find on the page. BuiltWith’s goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves.
27. LastPass
LastPass is a free online password manager and Form Filler that makes your browsing more secure.
28. iMacros
Automate your web browser. Record and replay repetitious work. Web developers use iMacros for web regression testing, performance testing and web transaction monitoring. It can also be combined with Google Speed Tracer, Firebug and other web development and test tools. XPath support is included.
29. Chrome Flags
It shows the country where the server is hosting.
30. Frame Two Pages
Put two tabs into one tab’s two frames. Useful to compare two pages.
31. Split Screen
Works very similar to “Frame Two Pages” extension, but the main difference is that you can browse pages not switching tabs.
32. Session Buddy
Session Buddy is a flexible session manager that allows you to quickly save and restore session tabs.
- View all of the tabs in each window of a current or saved session
- Assess easily whether a displayed session has changed
- Save the current session with 2 clicks
- Restore sessions into a set of windows, a single window, or the current window
- Access automatically saved crash recovery sessions after a Chrome or OS crash
- Optionally automatically save the previous session
- Edit sessions by deleting individual windows/tabs or rolling tabs into a single window
- Import a list of URLs
- Export a session to text or CSV format (more formats in development)
- Control what types of tabs Session Buddy recognizes
- Show/hide current session tab count in extension icon badge
For Further Reading:
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Ogonbat
Posted 636 days ago 27Hi All
This is my Chrome Extension, this is an automatic url reducer with a lot of features like views counter, list of link an more.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/admmikennonanhamkamgfdfkjpamodgj
i hope is usefoul
thanks
Pedro Simonetti
Posted 640 days ago 25Hi,
I tried to post a comment here, but somehow my comment was not approved. I’m a member of the Firebug Working Group working in a new version of Firebug Lite (1.3). We have developed an extension for Google Chrome with this new version, which has several improvements over the one listed on this post. Please adjust the link in the post to point to that version, as pointed by Paul Irish in a recent comment.
Thanks.
Saad Bassi
Posted 640 days ago 26Thanks for the update Pedro. Fixing right now
Shyju
Posted 641 days ago 24Great resource.Thanks alot
Kent Design
Posted 641 days ago 23Some good tips, am using a couple (res one in particular) but will investigate some more on the list, thank you!
solexy joomla
Posted 642 days ago 22great list of plugins
Paul Irish
Posted 642 days ago 21You should definitely change your firebug lite one to link to the “official” and more recently updated extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bmagokdooijbeehmkpknfglimnifench
It’s got a lot more features and is far more polished than the one that you’re currently linking.
thanks!
.-= Paul Irish´s last blog ..@font-face gotchas =-.
Kiel
Posted 642 days ago 20I’d just like to correct:
*more faster
in your first paragraph.
Otherwise, this is good stuff! ;)
PromoDriver
Posted 642 days ago 19I was hoping to see a form-fill plugin. That is about the only thing I am still looking for when using Chrome
Jae Xavier
Posted 643 days ago 18Some of these extensions need to be matured just a little bit more because of memory leaks that take a lot of RAM. I have to close Chrome completely to regain system resources.
Anooj
Posted 643 days ago 17Awesome round-up. One of the best I’ve seen. Kudos.
Bryan
Posted 643 days ago 16Try using chrome editor for easily drafting a html page without leaving your browser.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nglgdmkkiemejlladcdjegcllaieegoe?hl=en-US
.-= Bryan´s last blog ..Visual Rule of Three’s =-.
kevin
Posted 643 days ago 14That’s a nice list, i just installed some of em to try. Thanks.
Sully
Posted 643 days ago 13Great collection… I have never seen Speed Tracer or Chrome Sniffer. I will be installing them now.
Thanks,
Grün Weiss
Posted 643 days ago 12Cool Google Chrome Extensions, are firefox the best
.-= Grün Weiss´s last blog ..Frauenmannschaft Grün Weiss unterliegt Bad Bibra 1:2 =-.
Sean O
Posted 643 days ago 11If you develop with jQuery (and who doesn’t?), check out the jQuery API Search extension:
http://sean-o.com/jquery-api
– SEAN O (author)
Saad Bassi
Posted 643 days ago 15Cool.:) Looks useful :)
$hekh@r
Posted 643 days ago 10Amazing stuffs. really inspire me to use chrome.
Gines
Posted 643 days ago 9Very nice! If you have Pendule, you won’t need Eye Dropper, Color Picker or MeasureIt. I think I’ve tried most of them but kept what I need. I’m going to try some of them such as Speed Racer. Thanks for this!
.-= Gines´s last blog ..Domain Name as Our Contact Detail? =-.
Arnaud
Posted 643 days ago 8An simple extension for PHP developers :
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kfiahljocaflpaiopilgpiochncgdnhd
Alex
Posted 643 days ago 7Great list, I’m installing a couple now. You forgot one though….
Xmarks!
Not only will it sync your bookmarks across browsers and operating systems you can even sync open tabs. It’s a god send when checking multiple browsers. As is Last Pass which I also couldn’t live without, I even bought a paid account so I could get all my passwords on my Android phone
Lars
Posted 643 days ago 6most of the time i’m using chrome’s build-in development-tools. but this are some promising tools. especially the speed tracer extension seems very useful. and the chrome sniffer gives an easy insight. thanks
.-= Lars´s last blog ..Apache Tomcat und UTF-8 =-.
Robin Carlsson
Posted 643 days ago 5Lovely round-up!
Neelakandan
Posted 643 days ago 4That’s great. Thanks for sharing…..
Rilwis
Posted 643 days ago 3The Speed Tracer extension looks great. I was looking for an alternative for YSlow and Page Speed of Firefox but didn’t find anyone. This extension maybe the thing I need. Thanks for sharing.
.-= Rilwis´s last blog ..Displaying A Login Form In Sidebar Now Made Easy In WordPress 3.0 =-.
Zlatan Halilovic
Posted 643 days ago 2I had already installed a lot of these extensions prior to reading this article, but for some of these, which are VERY USEFUL btw, I was unaware that they even existed.
Tnx Valters :)
Pedro
Posted 643 days ago 1Some pretty cool extensions here man, Ive installed a couple of them already, thanks