30 Chrome Extensions to Boost Your Productivity as a Developer

January 25, 2022 13 min read

Chrome extensions for developers are unfairly overlooked and grossly underrated. They are essential tools for web developers and deeply useful even for someone who doesn't deal with front-ends. But the problem is that there are so many Chrome extensions that many developers don't know what they're missing out on.

So we compiled a list. Here are 30 Chrome extensions that will boost your productivity as a developer. All these extensions are free and will work not just on Chrome, but on any Chromium browser. So if you're using Opera, Brave, or Edge, this is for you too. Here are the ones we'll cover:

SimpleExtManager

Before you begin installing dozens of Chrome extensions, consider SimpleExtManager, a simple menu that easily enables, disables, and uninstalls extensions. You can also create extension groups to create categories of extensions. A must to maintain order in a universe of extension chaos.

Session Buddy

SimpleExtManager helps you manage extensions while Session Buddy helps you manage browser tabs and bookmarks. You can save open tabs as collections to restore later, recover open tabs after a crash, see your open tabs in one place, and easily search through open tabs and collections.

Web Developer

Web Developer was originally a Firefox extension now added to Chrome too. It adds a toolbar button to your browser with various web developer tools, such as display link details, view meta tag information, view javascript, and more. This extension helps streamline tasks for web developers and digital marketers.

Picture-in-Picture

Created by Google themselves, the Picture-in-Picture Chrome extension lets you watch videos in a floating window on top of other windows. Perfect if you want to watch a tech talk while also wanting to browse other websites.

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is an eyedropper, color picker, and gradient generator. A Firefox extension made available for Chrome, ColorZilla allows you to take the color of any pixel on any website. It keeps color history and has a webpage color analyzer that gives you the color palette of any website.

Window Resizer

Window Resizer helps you emulate various screen resolutions. An essential Chrome extension for web developers who want to test their design layout on different browser resolutions. You can customize what resolutions you want displayed by changing the window's width, height, position, preset icon, and more. Also has the option to export your settings to another device.

CSS Peeper

CSS Peeper allows you to extract CSS and build style guides. If you come across a beautiful website and you want to understand why it looks that great, this is the extension for you. It's great for web designers and developers who want to make their front-ends look better.

Animo

Write custom CSS for any website and see your changes in real-time with Animo. Customize a page’s colors, fonts, and even its layout. You can sync your CSS to the cloud and see it on any desktop device where you’re signed into Chrome. Considered the best Chrome extension for previewing your custom CSS.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer identifies the web technologies used on any website. It detects content management systems, ecommerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and more. Alternatively, you can also visit the extension's official website, where you can search for any website and see what technology it uses.

Octotree

Octotree is a browser extension that makes exploring and reviewing code on GitHub much easier. It creates a fast, IDE-like code tree on GitHub and allows for quick file searches, multi-tab support, and omni bookmarking. Used by over 400,000 developers.

CrxMouse

Make your mouse movements much more efficient with CrxMouse. Use mouse shortcuts such as hold right-click and drag left to go back or hold right-click and drag right to go forward. You can also customize your own mouse movement to expand what you can do with your mouse.

Lorem Ipsum Generator

This Lorem Ipsum Generator gives you lorem ipsum text that you can copy/paste directly into websites. It allows you to add paragraphs of variable length, titles, dates, email addresses, and mail addresses.

Fake Filler

Fake Filler fills all inputs on a page with fake/dummy data. If you’re a web developer who works with forms (and who doesn't, at some point?), this Chrome extension is a must-have. It eliminates the need to manually enter values in form fields and lets you to customize what type of fake data to put in. The plugin also ignores any hidden, disabled, read-only, or CAPTCHA fields.

Clear Cache

Clear Cache does what it says on the tin. It clears your cache and browsing data with a single click. No popups or confirmation buttons. Simple, fast, and easy. You can customize how much data you want to clear and whether cookies should be removed globally, only for certain domains, or for everything except for certain domains.

PerfectPixel

PerfectPixel lets you overlay a semi-transparent image over a website, so you can perform a pixel-by-pixel comparison between the website and the image. If you’re a web developer or designer, this Chrome extension helps you create websites exactly like you modeled them.

Image Downloader

Image Downloader is a Chrome extension that seeks and downloads all the images from a particular webpage, even those that have been hidden from view. It displays a thumbnail of each image found on the page and gives you the option to download either a selection or all of them at once.

GoFullPage

GoFullPage captures a screenshot of your current page in its entirety without asking for any extra permissions. Given today’s long webpages, this one-click Chrome extension is particularly helpful for web developers who want a full overview of a webpage.

Fonts Ninja

Fonts Ninja shows you what fonts a website uses. The extension allows you to inspect, try, bookmark, and even buy the fonts of any website. It will give you a font’s name, size, line spacing, letter spacing, and its color. An invaluable Chrome extension for web designers and developers.

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 and a clean fork from another page ruler extension that was unfortunately malicious.

TinEye

TinEye is the first image search engine to use image identification technology over 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.

FoxClocks

This one is for the remote developers. FoxClocks shows times around the world at the bottom of your browser. You can choose from a set of useful time formats or create your own. It's particularly useful for scheduling meetings or understanding when your colleagues will come online.

Check My Links

Check My Links is a link checker that crawls your website for broken links. It allows you to copy all broken links in a single click. Use this if you’re a web developer who doesn’t want to pay for expensive marketing tools, but who doesn't want their website to have any broken links.

Project Naptha

Project Naptha uses 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 translate them into different languages.

JSON Formatter

JSON Formatter lets you view and validate JSON documents in Chrome. It has collapsible trees, clickable URL, and allows you to toggle between raw and parsed JSON. It works on any valid JSON page, as well as on local files.

daily.dev

Daily.dev is the number one Chrome extension if you want to stay updated on the latest programming news. It’s a news aggregator for software developers that takes its input from hundreds of news sources. The extension is free, doesn’t need a sign-up, and is fully open-source.

Ghostery

Ghostery speeds up your Internet experience by blocking trackers and ads to protect your privacy and speed up websites. You can customize your blocking preferences by trusting or restricting particular websites, as well as pause the extension altogether.

EditThisCookie

EditThisCookie is a cookie manager: it allows you to add, delete, edit, search, protect, and block cookies. You can also export and import cookies in a JSON cookie file.

Lightshot

Lightshot is a simple, convenient screenshot tool. Simply select an area, edit your screenshot, and upload it to a server for easy access. It's very intuitive and useful for anyone who needs a quick website screenshot.

VisBug

Google announced this Chrome extension at its Dev Summit in 2018: VisBug is an open source browser design tool built with JavaScript. You can inspect styles, distances, spacing, edit text, replace images, etc. Consider it a FireBug for designers.

Checker Plus

Here's another one for the remote workers: Checker Plus is a Chrome extension that lets you see your calendar events without opening your Google Calendar page. It tells you know how much time you have left before your next meeting, displays popups, and lets you create new events with only a few clicks.

These were 30 Chrome extensions to boost your productivity as a developer. We hope you found at least one extension that will make your life just that little bit better. If you enjoyed reading this article and think others would enjoy it as well, please feel free to share it on social media using the buttons at the top of the page.