Google Chrome Extensions aren’t just for blocking ads, collecting your mail, and playing addictive java games, there are some fantastic tools out there which are extremely useful. To discover and highlight some of the better chrome extensions for web developers available we decided to ask a group of our web professionals what they use and enjoy. Here are the extensions they recommended:
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Appspector
One of the first and most popular extensions we were recommended by our professionals was Appspector. This likable plugin allows you to detect which applications and javascript libraries are running on any specific website.
This is a great tool for researching, studying, and exploring your favorite sites, learning what server-side apps and technology they use, such as PHP and Java. It also reveals some of the client tech including Google Analytics, WordPress, MooTools, and Joomla.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Disconnect
An alternative to Appspector, Disconnect is a powerful browser extension which allows you to dive into a site and see exactly what advertising, analytics and social media tracking cookies they use, and also gives you the useful option of being able to disable some or all of them.
Disconnect has a whole host of features, allowing you to create whitelists and blacklists trackers, and lots of cool options to view trackers and anaylse the stats.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – LightShot
This app seems to be one several of our professionals swear by. It’s an easy-to-use screenshot extension with lots of customization and useful features. Lightshot is seen as one of the fastest and easiest way to take custom screen captures, with a simple, lightweight interface.
This app really gets the job done in just a few clicks and allows you to easily edit your screen shots as you go. One of the cool functions is that it also lets you search for similar screenshots.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Vertical Tabs
This extension gives you a unique (and what many of our experts deem to be incredibly useful), way of viewing you Chrome tabs. As the name suggests, Vertical Tabs gives you an alternative interface with your tabs running vertically down your screen, but it’s more than just a novel way of viewing tabs, it also lets you sort and filter your tabs for quick and easy access, which is obviously extremely helpful when you have many tabs running and can no longer see icons. Another cool feature is the ability to easily drag, drop, and reorganize tabs and use smart keyboard shortcuts.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Tab Snooze
Alternatively if having too many tabs is causing you woes, this little extension can help put those problems to sleep. Hit the Tab Snooze icon and all your unwanted open tabs will be put to rest and out of sight, ready to return on your command.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – MeasureIt
A simple, geeky, and popular design extension is MeasureIt. This neat ruler extension allows you to immediately get the exact pixel width, height, and alignment of any element on a webpage. It also lets you create custom elements to see how they fit within a website. There really isn’t much more to it than that but sometimes the simplest tools are the best.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Live CSS Editor
Live CSSS Editor basically allows you to write live CSS onto any page. Using the provided HTML textbox, you can add your own CSS and immediately see how it affects the page you are browsing. It’s a great tool for quickly testing edits and other new ideas. The extension also allows you to set quick default commends and has the useful option of auto saving your changes, for those times when you close your browser too soon.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Jira Capture
JIRA Capture was very popular among our web developers. This nifty extension allows teams to quickly record and log bugs, and share lots of detailed feedback and analysis at speed. The best part is that it allows you to easily reproduce bugs which you’ve already raised within JIRA Capture, meaning your team can spend more time fixing bugs and far less time reproducing them for reports.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Taco
Taco is a Chrome extension that transforms the New Tab Page into a hub of productivity, pulling together all your popular tasks and notifications from over 40 web tools, apps, and services. It essentially gives you a well organized page of all your upcoming tasks and reminders, allowing you to better prioritize and manage your work load using simple drag and drop actions. You can also create tick lists and hide less important tasks while highlighting priority jobs.
Services covered by Taco include Trello, Todoist, Asana, Google Tasks, webmail and iCloud.
Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – Wunderlist
If you love to be organized but feel overwhelmed by using multiple apps and software and prefer things to be kept far simpler, then Wunderlist is popular extension which might be the one for you. Championed by our websperts for its simplicity, Wunderlist is a simple but effective ‘to do list’ extension, which is able to sync across all your devices.
What’s your favorite Google Chrome extension, and why? Let us know on the WCB Fanpage.
