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My list of almost indispensable Chrome Extensions

Adrian Matei on January 09, 2020

I came to find out that chrome extensions are great. Be it for productivity boosting, bookmarking, as developer tools or writing, I use them extens...
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Saqib Ameen • Edited

Hey,

Thank you so much for sharing your list of Chrome extensions. I really find such posts helpful. It's good to know which tools fellow developers use to accomplish similar tasks.

I also use the Clear Cache, JSON View, and Grammarly extensions. I wonder what extension do you use for your new tab? Also, don't you block ads?

I use have been using DailyNowCo as my new tab extension for more than a year now. It helps me save tons of time by helping me stay up to date with all new development news. I would definitely recommend checking it out.

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Colum Ferry

I don't block ads. As annoying and potentially privacy-invading as they are, there are people who genuinely rely on income generated from ads to support themselves.

I know a lot of the extensions allow for whitelisting sites to show ads on, but I'm lazy and listing all sites that are from people I want to support or from sites that can't be used at all unless the ad-blocker is turned off is too much effort.

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Saqib Ameen

You are right about the fact that there are some people doing really great and rely on ads for income. I try whitelisting the sites which produce good content and I want to support. But for the most part on the web, I find ads annoying.

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Adrian Matei • Edited

Hey Saqib,

I use Brave - highly recommend it, so it blocks ads automatically, unless opt in to see ads for BATs (Basic Attention Tokens). I used DailyNow before, I'll give it another try - thanks for the reminder.

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Saqib Ameen

Ever since I have started using Chrome (more than 7y) I didn't use any browser. Would you mind sharing why you prefer Brave? I have heard of it but never tried. Especially, how good is it in terms of supporting web APIs and providing web development tools?

Sure, Daily improves constantly and I can't recommend it enough! BTW great work at bookmarks.dev 🙌

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Adrian Matei

It is Chromium-based, so the Developer Tools and Extensions work the same as in Chrome. I use it for privacy reasons and performance (before all on my phone). It's worth trying...

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Saqib Ameen

That makes sense. Thank you so much for sharing, I will definitely try it out.

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Jakob Attkinson

While I think Brave is amazing and I use it as my main browser while working, my daily driver has been Vivaldi for almost a year now. I started to love Vivaldi's level of customization a lot. From search bar at the top of bottomm to quick notes on pages and a focus mode, Vivaldi has been a best for me.

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Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️)

Sweeeet, Octotree is now installed! A couple more that I personally would struggle without:

Display Anchors — Surprisingly useful for seeing and sharing anchor links.

Bookmark Bar Switcher — Good if you've got multiple contexts. I have one for work, guitar, cdertain projects etc.

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Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

ColorZilla is definitely my favorite for color work :) I also run StayFocusd and uBlock Origin, though they have nothing to do with dev specifically.

Also, as a copy editor, I have to strongly disagree with Grammarly. I've given it sample writing out of curiosity in the past, and it's always made egregious errors and "improvements" that made the writing worse.

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Adrian Matei

Thanks for your input, I use it mostly for spelling...

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Trishul

Half of the extensions would not be required if you have Firefox 😎

  • Bookmark - right click => Bookmark this link (this can be synced across devices with Firefox accounts)
  • window resizer - right click => inspect element => responsive mode (right top of inspect element window)(size + throttle)
  • JSONview - default for and JSON link (try this in Firefox jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1)
  • window resizer - right click => inspect element - color picker/eyedropper icon (next to search HTML)
  • CSS viewer - right click => inspect element - rules and computed rules
  • Clear cache - right click => inspect element => storage (if you are really lazy extension helps)
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Sparkdex

Wait what ?
That's something one can easily do in chrome too and not Firefox exclusive

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Shafiqul Islam Shuvo

Did you ever use Chrome? Lol!

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Trishul

True, but my point is we do not need extensions for these native stuff.

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George WL

Another recommend for me personally, FormFiller by Hussain Shabbir

github.com/husainshabbir/form-filler

It's saved me so much time when testing forms I've made.

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Adrian Matei • Edited

Perfect, thanks. That's a nice one - I think I'll add it to the list...

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Andrew

For me, another must-have extension is Video Speed Controller

github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

saves a lot of time and hotkeys are the same for all websites :)

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Adrian Matei

Convinced - it's now on the list...

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Adrian Matei

Sweet - thanks

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digeomel

In addition to the ones you already mentioned:

  • Wappalyzer
  • Angular state inspector
  • Daily 2.0 - Source for Busy Developers
  • JetBrains IDE Support
  • Page Ruler Redux
  • Save to Pocket
  • WhatFont
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Tomer Ovadia • Edited

Thank you for sharing it, check out My 12 Favorite Chrome Extensions as a Web Developer ⚡🚀 dev.to/otomer/my-12-favorite-chrom...

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Rihan

Isn't Lighthouse built into Chromium's Dev tools?

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Adrian Matei • Edited

Apparently yes, thanks for pointing that out. You need to go to Dev Tools > Audits...

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Carlos Augusto de Medeir Filho

Interesting list