If you’re a designer or web developer, recognizing the significance of having the appropriate tools readily available is crucial. Undoubtedly, you have your preferred software for handling substantial tasks.

However, what about those minor, repetitive responsibilities that consume your time? This is where Chrome extensions come into play. These compact add-ons seamlessly integrate with your browser, streamlining your workflow and enhancing efficiency.

We’ve all experienced it—juggling tabs, copying hex codes, or manually gauging screen dimensions. Initially, these tasks may not seem significant, but their cumulative impact can be substantial. Throughout a project, you might expend hours on activities that could have been simplified with the aid of the right extension. The objective here is to acquaint you with some Chrome extensions that can liberate your time for more imaginative and intricate work.

This compilation isn’t just a haphazard assortment of popular tools; ranging from color selection to responsive design testing, these ingenious extensions have the potential to significantly transform your daily work routine.

1. Fonts Ninja

Fonts Ninja stands out as an invaluable browser extension seamlessly integrated into and accelerating your design workflow. This intelligent tool revolutionises font exploration by allowing you to identify and evaluate fonts directly from any website you visit.

Leveraging advanced features driven by a proprietary algorithm, Fonts Ninja performs precise analyses of font files, swiftly disclosing font names and CSS properties with a simple hover-over action. For a comprehensive overview, the primary extension window conveniently summarises all fonts utilised on a specific page.

Fonts Ninja goes beyond basic functionality by furnishing extensive details about each font, including available styles, the foundry, and pricing information. To enhance your design organisation, you can bookmark fonts and conveniently manage those bookmarks within the extension. Opting for the premium version unlocks the ability to install trial versions of discovered fonts from various websites, seamlessly deployable in any software of your choice.

2. Kontrast

Kontrast stands as a browser extension that offers a swift method for evaluating and adjusting text and background contrast, ensuring compliance with WCAG requirements.

Upon installation, Kontrast facilitates automatic contrast inspection for selected elements, presenting the accessibility ratio directly on the screen. Notable features include a colour slider and picker, delivering both RGB and HSL modes for enhanced customisation.

Adding to its functionality, Kontrast goes the extra mile by automatically suggesting the nearest WCAG-compliant colour, streamlining user decision-making. The extension also provides options to copy colours in various formats such as HEX, RGBA, and HSLA. Furthermore, it offers the flexibility to disregard CSS hover effects and seamlessly integrates with dark mode settings. ⁣

3. Responsive Viewer

Responsive Viewer emerges as an invaluable Chrome extension designed to assist front-end developers in visualising and testing the responsive designs of their websites or applications. This tool proves highly beneficial by enabling the simultaneous display of multiple screens within a single view, thereby streamlining the process of responsiveness testing.

This extension stands out for its capability to simplify and enhance the testing of responsive designs. The convenience of viewing multiple screens concurrently not only facilitates more comprehensive testing but also makes it easier to identify and address any issues that may arise during the testing phase.

4. JSONVue

JSONVue serves as a tool primarily designed for validating and displaying JSON documents. Leveraging a client-side JavaScript implementation called JSONLint, JSONVue ensures stringent adherence to RFC 4627 specifications for presenting JSON text.

An outstanding characteristic of JSONVue is its flexibility through a customisable stylesheet, allowing users to tailor the visual representation of their JSON content to meet specific requirements. Furthermore, JSONVue extends support to JSONP, a script-injection method facilitating data requests from a server in a different domain than the client. This feature enhances the robustness of API utilisation.

5. VisBug

The VisBug extension, often likened to a “FireBug for designers,” empowers users with the ability to directly manipulate web page elements from within their browser. With VisBug, users can seamlessly point, click, move, resize, and edit any page as if it were an artboard. This functionality provides the opportunity to experiment with styles, spacing, distances, accessibility features, and alignment.

One notable aspect of this tool is its capability to visualise layouts as they would appear in an actual end-user environment, across various device sizes. This facilitates precise and detailed design efforts. Additionally, VisBug allows users to leverage their Adobe or Sketch skills.

Other standout features include text editing, image replacement, and the ability to design amid complexity, utilizing production or prototype scenarios and the diverse states they generate as artboards and design opportunities.

VisBug also empowers users to make more front-end decisions on their website or app, such as accessibility, responsiveness, and edge cases, without the need to wait for developers. This streamlines the design and decision-making process, fostering greater autonomy for designers.

6. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer stands out as a technology profiler that provides the capability to identify the diverse technologies employed by any visited website. This tool excels in pinpointing not only the Content Management System (CMS) a website utilises but also any frameworks, ecommerce platforms, and JavaScript libraries it incorporates.

Wappalyzer extends its reach beyond basic CMS or framework detection, boasting the ability to uncover over a thousand technologies across a broad spectrum of categories. These categories include programming languages, analytics tools, marketing platforms, payment gateways, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Content Delivery Network (CDN), and more.

By installing Wappalyzer onto your Chrome browser, you effortlessly gain insights into the technological landscape of the websites you visit, offering a comprehensive overview of the various tools and systems at play. This tool proves invaluable for those seeking to understand the technological stack of websites for research, development, or analytical purposes.

7. Web Editor

The Web Editor utility is an intuitive and user-friendly tool that empowers users to inspect website elements, customise their properties, add content, and design layouts in a streamlined and hassle-free manner.

This utility offers users the flexibility to visualise and manipulate their websites precisely as desired, without the need for extensive technical knowledge. It stands out for democratising web design, ensuring accessibility even for individuals with limited technical skills. The Web Editor’s user-friendly interface and easy navigation facilitate experimentation with web designs, while the tool handles the technical complexities.

This tool proves especially beneficial for those interested in exploring web design without a steep learning curve. It caters to both beginners looking to dip their toes into web design and developers seeking to save time on tweaks and edits. Overall, the Web Editor is an ideal choice for simplifying the web design process and making it more approachable for a broader audience.

8. GoFullPage

As a user, the GoFullPage extension provides a convenient solution for capturing complete webpage screenshots reliably, without necessitating additional permissions. To utilise this feature, simply click on the extension’s icon or use the ‘Alt+Shift+P’ shortcut.

Efficiently, the extension captures each section of the webpage, compiling the screenshot, and presents it in a new browser tab. You can then download the screenshot as an image or a PDF file, or effortlessly drag it to your desktop.

The extension is adept at handling intricate pages containing inner scrollable elements and iframes, overcoming challenges that other similar tools might face. For expansive pages exceeding a single image capacity, the extension intelligently divides the screenshot into multiple smaller images distributed across various tabs.

Export choices include PNG, JPEG, and various PDF sizes, all adjustable to suit your preferences.

9. Cookie Editor

A user-friendly yet robust Cookie Editor enables you to swiftly create, edit, and delete cookies without navigating away from your current tab.

Cookie-Editor boasts a straightforward interface, facilitating standard cookie operations with ease. Tailored for web development, testing, or manual cookie management for privacy, it simplifies the process for users.

Caution is advised! Sharing cookies is risky, as they may contain sensitive information such as login credentials. Only share cookies with trusted individuals, as providing access to your account through shared cookies can compromise its security.

10. Fake Filler

The Fake Filler extension stands as an essential aid for developers and testers dealing with forms, efficiently populating all input fields on a webpage with randomly generated dummy data. This includes names, emails, phone numbers, and more, significantly reducing the necessity for manual data entry.

One of its standout features is its user-friendly default settings, allowing immediate use without any initial configuration. As your requirements become more specific, the extension offers robust customisation through custom fields.

The tool prudently bypasses CAPTCHA, hidden, disabled, and readonly fields, ensuring that your time is not wasted on irrelevant inputs. The Fake Filler extension proves highly valuable for accelerating and streamlining the testing process, eliminating the laborious task of manually inputting data into form fields for testing purposes.

11. Lighthouse

Lighthouse, a powerful open-source tool developed by Google Developers, serves as a convenient solution for optimising the performance, quality, and accuracy of your web applications. By subjecting a page to an audit, Lighthouse performs a series of tests and generates a detailed report showcasing the page’s overall effectiveness.

Failed tests within the report serve as clear indicators, highlighting areas that require improvement for your application. Lighthouse provides accessible resources at your fingertips, including a quick-start guide for new users and the capability to view and share your reports online. This tool ensures that you have the essential insights to enhance your web application with just a click.

12. Stylebot

Stylebot stands out as a user-friendly extension that empowers you to instantly modify the visual appearance of any web page. With a simple selection of an element, you can effortlessly adjust aspects like font, colour, margins, visibility, and more through the provided editor.

For users with coding expertise, Stylebot also allows manual CSS coding, providing a personalised touch to your browsing experience. Noteworthy features include a ‘Readability Mode,’ which simplifies article consumption by hiding non-essential elements like sidebars, footers, and ads. Additionally, the ‘Grayscale Mode’ helps reduce eye strain.

All changes made are automatically saved and applied the next time you visit the page, ensuring a seamless and customised browsing experience.

13. PerfectPixel

PerfectPixel is an essential extension for web developers and markup designers who prioritise achieving pixel-perfect accuracy in their websites. The tool operates by creating a semi-transparent image overlay directly on top of your HTML, facilitating a precise comparison between your design and the developed output.

To enhance efficiency, PerfectPixel provides multiple layer support, layer inversion, scaling options, and individual layers for each website. The user-friendly interface supports drag-and-drop file upload, pasting from URLs or the clipboard, and seamless navigation using keyboard arrow keys or the mouse wheel.

Configurations for your layers persist between browsing sessions, ensuring a consistent experience. Opting for the Pro version eliminates ads and unlocks additional features such as layer rotation, UI customisation, and premium support, making PerfectPixel a comprehensive solution for achieving design accuracy.

14. Web Developer

The Web Developer extension equips you with a comprehensive suite of web development tools seamlessly integrated into your browser. With a user-friendly toolbar button added upon installation, it provides convenient access to a myriad of resources, making it an ideal choice for routine website audits or troubleshooting and resolving issues.

As the officially recognised port of the renowned Web Developer extension for Firefox, it ensures swift and powerful performance in various scenarios. A must-have for web developers and anyone keen on enhancing website structure and functionality, this extension offers unparalleled convenience and accessibility right within the browser. It simplifies tasks such as troubleshooting, testing, and analysing websites, making it an indispensable tool for web development.

15. 30 Seconds of Knowledge

Elevate your developer skills with a web extension that transforms every New Tab into a learning opportunity!

Immerse yourself in skill development each time you open a New Tab! Tailor your experience by selecting the programming languages you wish to enhance in the extension options, and watch your knowledge grow with each New Tab. Spend just 30 seconds grasping insightful code snippets to refine your understanding. Found something valuable? Easily integrate it into your code with a quick copy/paste – and you’re on your way to golden insights!

16. WP Hive

The WP Hive Chrome Extension marks a revolutionary leap for WordPress users, seamlessly integrated into Chrome for unparalleled convenience.

Ever pondered about the impact of a plugin on your WordPress website? WP Hive’s Plugin testing tool takes the guesswork out by automatically testing plugins, providing valuable insights. Effortlessly explore new or popular plugins using relevant filters, and make comparisons akin to scrutinizing smartphones.

Access crucial metrics such as memory usage and pagespeed impact, PHP errors, warnings or notices, Javascript issues, PHP 7.4 compatibility, compatibility with the latest WordPress 5.5 version, database footprint, activation errors, and resource errors – all directly from your WordPress.org page.

WP Hive conducts automated tests on all WordPress plugins, generating insightful metrics displayed within the WordPress.org plugin pages. Compare plugins with ease and gain detailed insights, courtesy of WP Hive. Additionally, the extension offers an option to redirect to the WP Hive plugin page for a specific plugin, enhancing the already great WordPress repository with superior insights and added value for users.

17. Hackertab.dev

For developers, keeping abreast of the latest in the field can be challenging. Enter Hackertab, simplifying the process by enabling you to customise your default tab page. This integration seamlessly brings together news, tools, and events from leading sources like GitHub Trendings, Hacker News, DevTo, Medium, and Product Hunt.

Regardless of your specific development focus, Hackertab ensures you have easy access to valuable and pertinent information, tailored to your preferences. Stay in the loop effortlessly with Hackertab.

18. Initab

Initab, a New Tab Extension designed for developers, presents a remedy for the perpetual challenge of having an excessive number of tabs open. Alongside decluttering, it provides a suite of handy tools to simplify your role as a developer.

With a swift overview of your GitHub or GitLab Issue activity, Stack Overflow engagement, and more, Initab streamlines your workflow, ensuring you have the essential information at your fingertips. Keep your tabs organised and enhance your developer experience with Initab.