Browser extensions are a great way for developers to improve their productivity. Considering Chrome is still by far the browser with the highest market share, I've collected a list of 14 free Chrome extensions that can make you a more productive developer.
The Great Suspender
Google Chrome has a notoriously high memory footprint. The Great Suspender is a lightweight extension that reduces Chrome's chokehold on your device's RAM by suspending tabs that you haven't viewed for a while. The extension is quite configurable. You can configure when tabs get suspended, whether or not to suspend tabs playing audio, whether or not the extension will show a before-suspension screenshot of a suspended tab, and more.
Sessions Buddy
Sessions Buddy is a browser tab and bookmark management extension. It helps you manage and organize all your open tabs in one place. You can also recover open tabs if your browser crashes or when you restart your device and you can export your tabs in a variety of formats suitable for emails, posts, documents, etc...
Web Developer
Web Developer is the official Web Developer extension for Firefox. It adds a toolbar button to the browser with various web developer tools. This extension can help streamline tasks for web developers, digital marketers, and anyone who deals with SEO.
ColorZilla
ColorZilla is an eyedropper, color picker, and gradient generator. A Firefox extension finally available for Chrome, ColorZilla allows you to get the color of any pixel on any website. Additionally, ColorZilla keeps the color history of your recently picked colors and it has a webpage color analyzer that gives you the color palette of any site.
Window Resizer
Window Resizer helps you emulate various screen resolutions. Easily test your design layout on different browser resolutions with this extension. You can customize what resolutions you want displayed by changing the window's width, height, position, preset icon, and more.
CSSViewer
CSSViewer is a straightforward CSS property viewer. Originally a Firefox add-on (again), CSSViewer shows you the CSS of any element on any page.
Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer identifies the web technologies used on any website. It detects content management systems, ecommerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and many more. Alternatively, you can also visit the extension's official website, where you can search for any website and see what technology it uses.
Clear Cache
Clear Cache clears your cache and browsing data with a single click. No popups or confirmation buttons. Simple, fast, easy. You can customize how much data you want to clear and you can also decide whether cookies should be removed globally, only for certain domains, or for everything except for certain domains.
PerfectPixel
PerfectPixel allows you to overlay a semi-transparent image over a website, so you can perform a pixel-by-pixel comparison between the website and the image. This allows web developers and designers to create websites exactly how they'd modeled them to look like.
Fontface Ninja
Fontface Ninja shows you what fonts are being used on any website. You can inspect, try, bookmark, and even buy the fonts from any website. The extension will give you the name, size, line spacing, letter-spacing, and the color of the font you select.
Page Ruler Redux
Page Ruler Redux gives you a ruler to measure pixel dimensions and positioning. You can display the width, height, and position of any element on any website. This extension is open-source (here's its GitHub page) and is a clean fork from another page ruler extension that was unfortunately malicious.
TinEye Reverse Image Search
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology, instead of using keywords, metadata or watermarks. This extension finds exact matches, including those that have been cropped, edited or resized. Using TinEye is private and free for non-commercial purposes. It doesn't save your search images.
Check My Links
Check My Links is a link checker that crawls through your website and looks for broken links. Particularly useful for websites with lots of links. The extension checks which links are valid and which ones are broken. It allows you to copy all bad links with one click.
Project Naptha
Project Naptha uses smart OCR technology so you can highlight, copy, edit, and translate text from any image on the web. It also allows you to erase the words from an image, edit them, and even translate them into a different language.
I hope you've found at least a few extensions that will make your life easier! Do you have any favorite browser extensions? Let me know in the comments below 👇.
Top comments (1)
I would like to add one to this list: chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/...