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The arrival of Google Chrome in late 2008 led many web developers and designers to consider switching from Firefox, their industry standard browser. Most have stayed loyal to Firefox, however, and with good reason. It takes a long time to create a browser environment that you feel comfortable with and at home in. Getting the right balance of plugins, of which there are lots more available for Firefox than Chrome, is an evolutionary process which takes a long time.

Fast forward a year (and a bit) and the situation has changed. Google Chrome’s Extensions site is offering tons of great extensions created with developers and designers in mind. People have started to notice too that Chrome is faster than Firefox, uses less CPU and comes with a suite of web development tools built in. Extensions are incredibly quick and easy to install (and uninstall), without even the need to restart your browser. Take a look at the 15 Must Have Chrome Extensions for Web Developers & Designers below and decide for yourself whether it’s time to make that switch.

1. Firebug Lite

Firebug is an incredibly good Firefox extension used by pretty much all serious web developers. It gives you the ability to inspectt various elements on a page and edit CSS, XHTML and JavaScript on the fly. These two features compliment each other perfectly, allowing you to first inspect” to find a problem before fixing it quickly with the “Edit” tab. Firebug Lite is a lightweight version of Firebug for Chrome users.

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2. Pendule

Pendule offers a fantastic portfolio of useful web development tools, packaged in a really unfussy, simple way. It offers a colour picker and ruler as well as the ability to view page source, disable CSS, hide images and show alt text, dimensions and paths. It even validates CSS, HTML and Feeds.

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3. META SEO Inspector

META SEO Inspector uncovers the useful, invisible data that you, as a web developer, want to see. It lets you verify the description tag of your site for SEO purposes and to follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. It even alerts you when Meta data is not within certain ranges and links to info-sites about the pages you’re viewing.

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4. Aviary Screen Capture

Aviary Screen Capture is a useful extension for everyone to use, but web designers will find it particularly valuable. It lets you take a screenshot of any webpage and edit it in your browser. You can edit (crop, resize, rotate), do markup (draw arrows and shapes), add notes and get exact pixel colours.

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5. Lorem Ipsum Generator

Simple but very effective, this extension is of use to all web designers, giving them instant access to an easy-to-use lorem ipsum generator. The extension has been designed to simplify things as much as possible, using less code, which is not only less confusing, but uses less memory.

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6. Resolution Test

With this lightweight extension, developers can change the size of their browser window to test their sites at different screen resolutions. You can choose from a list of common resolutions or specify your own. All you need to do is click the resolution test icon in the top right of the browser, choose resolutions, and press “View all selected”.

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7. Chrome SEO

Chrome SEO is a must for all web developers. With its suite of SEO tools, you can perform all SEO tasks, including competitive analysis, keyword research, social bookmark counts, traffic, ratings and backlink checks.

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8. IE Tab

IE Tab uses Internet Explorer to display web pages in Chrome, perfect for developers who want to test the IE rendering engine, use the Explorer view for local files, or those who want to use ActiveX controls. At the moment it’s Windows only.

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9. iMacros for Chrome

Find yourself performing repetitive tasks again and again each time you go online? Don’t we all! iMacros makes your life that little bit easier, letting you record long actions and repeat them at the touch of a button. Web developers find it particularly useful for regression testing, performance testing and transaction monitoring.

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10. Picnik Extension for Chrome

For those of you that don’t know, Picnik is a free browser-based image editing tool used by impoverished web designers the world over. It really is a great, free alternative to Photoshop. This extension brings the power of Picnik to the fore, letting you pick an image from a page, edit, annotate and share it.

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11. Speed Tracer

Use Speed Tracer to identity and then rectify problems that you’re experiencing with your web apps. It identifies problems caused by everything from JavaScript parsing and execution to CSSstyle recalculation, DOM event handling, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks and much more.

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12. Validity

Validity is a quick and easy way to validate a current web page. Simply validate by clicking on the Validity icon in the address bar or pressing “Ctrl+Alt+V”. You can even use your own installation of the W3C Validation Service if you wish.

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13. Snippy

Snippy is a really useful extension for collecting snippets of screenshots from a range of different sites. All you do is navigate to a web page, click on the Snippy icon, select which elements from the page you want to save, and press Show Snippets to bring up a window with all the elements you’ve selected. You can combine as many snippets as you like, from as many different sites as you like.

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14. Chrome Flags

Chrome Flags simply displays a flag icon in the address bar showing the physical location of the website you are viewing. Click on the flag and you’ll be presented with additional information about the site’s servers, owners and traffic. It’s perfect for establishing the trustworthiness of a site you’re unsure about.

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15. BuiltWith

BuiltWith gives you details of all the technologies used on the site you’re viewing. You’ll get information about widgets (snap preview), analytics (Google, Nielsen), frameworks (.NET, Java), publishing (WordPress, Blogger), advertising (DoubleClick, AdSense), CDNs (Amazon S3, Limelight), standards (XHTML,RSS) and hosting software (Apache, IIS, CentOS, Debian). Simply click the BuiltWith icon.

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About The Author

Tom is a writer and designer from the UK who works online full-time for a specialist supplier of Epson ink, toner and paper based in Manchester. His writing covers a wide variety of topics from advertising to modern art and can be found at CreativeCloud.

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