A couple of months ago, we reviewed the new Firefox browser designed for developers. Since then most of our developers kept Google Chrome as their primary browser. Working with Chrome offers access to an immense repository of Chrome extensions and tools which make our daily tasks less of a chore. With the built-in developer tools, there seems to be no further need for more tools. However, I’d like to present you 16 of the best Google Chrome extensions for developers.

16 of the best Google Chrome Extensions for developers

1. Usersnap

The Usersnap Chrome extension lets you capture and annotate any web page directly in your browser. It’s super-easy to provide visual feedback on prototypes or report bugs with this Chrome extension. And all created screenshots are directly stored in your project dashboard, making bug tracking and feedback a lot of fun!

See Usersnap’s Chrome extension in action:

Usersnap is an award-winning bug tracking and feedback tool, featured by Inc., Forbes, Techcrunch, and the Huffington Post. It is loved by companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft who use Usersnap on a daily basis to work together on web projects.

Try Usersnap for free for 15 days here.



2. Web Developer

The web developer extension for Chrome adds a little toolbar with different tools available. The original concept of this Chrome extension for developers came from the PNH Developer Toolbar.

The chrome extension web developers has a lot of handy tools a developer can use in their day-to-day work – for designers as well as programmers. It allows you to do a lot of more then the standard Chrome Inspector, like being able to easily add outlines to elements just by clicking, displaying rulers, finding all broken images on a page, and lots more.

Link: Web developer extension.

3. Hiver

This is a tool that helps teams manage group inboxes like engineering@ and bugs@, right from Gmail. With Hiver, critical emails – regarding support escalations and other technical bug problems – arriving in these inboxes can be auto-assigned to individual developers and kept track of in real-time, till the point of resolution.

Link: Hiver

4. f19N Obtrusive Live Test

This Chrome extension for developers is a sandboxed, extendable Webpage Testing Framework. It allows devs to test all pages on predefined best practices such as SEO or web performance. It is very simple to create the tests yourself.

You get direct visual feedback and see what is happening in the browser during page loads and render lifecycles.

Link: F19N Obtrusive Live Test

5. Window Resizer for Developer

The Window Resizer extension lets you resize your browser window on the fly. Clicking on the icon in the menu bar produces a drop down menu of window sizes which you can customize. What’s neat about the Window Resizer is that it offers an option to launch it as pop-up, enabling you to switch through different screen resolutions and see if your media breakpoints are working as expected. On top of that, you can also rotate your screen and customize the presets.

Link: Window Resizer

6. ColorPick Eyedropper

ColorPick Eyedropper is a simple color picker tool that allows you to select color values from any web page.

Link: ColorPick Eyedropper

7. CSSViewer

CSSViewer is a simple CSS property viewer. It provides a floating panel that reports on the identity of the section that the mouse is over, along with its font, text, color, background, box, positioning and effects attributes. CSSViewer provided the basic CSS information you need quickly. Make sure to install this Chrome extension.

Link: CSS Viewer

8. Lorem Ipsum generator

The lorem ipsum generator does what it’s name states. It provides an easy and quick way to create default text. Definitely, this is a quick win if you need some default text as a placeholder.

Link: Lorem Ipsum Generator

9. actiTIME

actiTIME Timer helps developers to keep track of work hours directly from the web browser and web apps such as Jira.It is used by companies and freelancers for analyzing performance and controlling the project’s progress and profitability.

Link: actiTIME

10. Ghostery

Ghostery is a great Chrome extension which detects trackers, pixels, and any other embedded snippet on a website. You immediately see which plugins and trackers are installed on the web page you’ve visited. Further on, Ghostery lets you protect your privacy. There’s no registration or sign up required to use this Chrome extension.

Link: Ghostery

11. Wappalyzer

Similar to Ghostery, the Wappalyzer Chrome extension lets you identify software that is installed on any particular website. It uncovers technologies and. content management system, eCommerce platforms, web servers, JavaScript frameworks and installed analytics tools.

Link: Wappalyzer

12. IE Tab

In need to do some manual IE testing and don’t want to install all kind of different Internet Explorer versions? Check out the IE Tab extension for Chrome which emulates IE by using the IE rendering engine directly in Chrome. You can test your website for IE6, IE7, IE8 or IE9 directly in your chrome browser.

Unfortunately, the IE Tab Chrome extension is only available for Windows at the moment.

Link: IE Tab

13. Site Spider

If you need to find broken links on your site and want to restrict spidering to a specific directory you need Site Spider.

Link: Site Spider

14. Session Manager

When you’re working on the web, browser tabs management is a great skill. Session Manager is your Chrome extension to go. It saves your browsing state and lets you re-open the session later. It is particularly useful if you find yourself opening the same web pages over and over.

Link: Session Manager

15. Clear Cache

This extremely useful Chrome extension allows you to clear your cache from the toolbar. It works “behind-the-scenes” meaning there are no popups or confirmation dialogs to distract you. It’s customizable in terms of how much data you want to clear, including app cache, downloads, file systems, form data, history, local storage, passwords and much more.

Link: Clear Cache

16. JSONView

As a developer working with RESTful APIs, reading raw JSON data on a browser can be quite awkward. It’s much easier to read JSON in tree-view, rather than in its raw state. The Chrome extension JSONView helps you view JSON documents in the browser.

Link: JSON Viewer

This article was brought to you by Usersnap – a visual bug tracking tool used by software companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.