7 useful Chrome extensions for developers in 2022

Google Chrome has nearly 70% of the browser market share, and for good reasons too. It is lightweight, secure, and independent of device screen size. Besides everyday users, Google Chrome is an excellent browser for developers. It comes with versatile developer tools that can be used for testing web applications. However, this article is not about the developer tools capabilities, but another feature instead.

We are about to discuss the top Chrome extensions for developers. We will list the most useful Chrome extensions to help developers automate and accelerate their tasks.

Web Developer

The Web Developer Chrome extension adds a toolbar to the browser, making it quite convenient for web developers to check various elements of their web design.

This Google Chrome extension has a lot of handy tools for web developers, but web designers and programmers can also use it. Apart from the usual tools you get with Chrome Inspector, this add-on also provides tools such as grid rulers, the ability to easily add outlines to elements just with a click, find broken images automatically, and many more.

Githunt

Githunt is one of the top Chrome extensions for developers who spend much time on GitHub. If you are an enthusiast who is actively looking for open source projects to work on, this add-on can bring you all GitHub’s trending projects within the browser. It highlights all trending projects in the new tab area in Chrome.

With Githunt, you can see all the essential information about a GitHub project within the new tab area. It displays the language of the project, the project description, and the number of currently open issues. You can open the project directly by simply clicking on the project card displayed in the browser. It is a convenient tool if you spend much time contributing to open-source projects.

JSON Viewer

JSON Viewer is one of the best developer tools to add to the Chrome browser as it can quickly manage JSON data into a recognizable hierarchy view. As a developer, you often have to work with JSON data, mainly with APIs. Working with the raw JSON data can be highly tedious and time-consuming. By using JSON Viewer, developers can easily read and use JSON data.

WhatFont

If you often spend much time identifying the fonts used on web pages, WhatFont is one of the top Chrome extensions that you can use to identify the fonts used within a web page automatically. 

It is an excellent developer tool for web designers to identify individual fonts within a web page quickly and effectively. Not only the font family, but this add-on also determines the font size, weight, and color.

WhatFont is ideal for web developers who typically design web pages around typography. Also, this Chrome extension is lightweight and does not slow down the browser.

UX Check

The user experience measures the quality of a web design and how intuitive is the overall interface. It helps to have an evaluation tool in your kitty that you can use to analyze the UX elements used within a web page quickly. 

UX Check is a great Chrome extension that uses Nielsen’s 10 heuristics to assess a web page. This usability analyzer can help web developers quickly highlight potential usability issues that can lead to poor user experience. It is a potent add-on that allows developers to add notes, take screenshots, and export findings in the report that they can share with their team.

This Chrome extension provides a fast and effective way to quickly perform lightweight user testing to find UX issues.

Web Developer Checklist

Checklists are essential for developers, but in 2022 it is too crude to maintain manual checklists. It is why developers should add the Web Developer Checklist extension to their Chrome browsers. This add-on gives you a checklist of all the essential web development factors that must be checked before the page is published. Once installed, with a single click, the extension will pull up a checklist of the best practices you must complete before making the page live. The add-on has a checklist on several measures such as SEO, accessibility, usability, mobile responsiveness, performance, social, and many more.

EditThisCookie

EditThisCookie is a must-have developer tool for creating web pages or testing websites. This exceptionally fast Chrome add-on enables developers to edit, delete, create, and protect cookies within the browser per page. 

Cookies are essential for speeding up websites and creating personalized user experiences. This developer tool lets you export cookies for analysis. You can block cookies, import cookies in JSON format, and do anything you need to do to a cookie. Most developers appreciate how easy it is to search and read cookies using this Chrome extension.

Conclusion 

The list of valuable Chrome extensions for developers in 2022 we have created is diverse. We picked the developer tools that are useful whether you are designing a web page, testing a website, or working with APIs. We hope these Chrome extensions will help increase productivity, solve problems, and streamline your web development process.

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5 developer tools to boost productivity

A developer’s workflow must be uninterrupted to ensure the quality of code is not affected, but it’s hardly ever without potential interruptions and context switches. Fortunately, developer tools can help programmers maintain consistent flow states. These productivity tools allow developers to create more productive workflows.

Here we list the best productivity tools for developers picked by expert software engineers at Talent500.

1. Tuple: Productivity tool for remote pair programming 

Collaboration apps like Zoom or Slack might be appropriate for team meetings and project discussions, but for remote pair programming, they fail to provide the much-needed workflow sync. Tuple is a dedicated developer tool explicitly designed for pair programming.

It features a pair programming-focused screen sharing UI and the ability to control remote machines on low-latency connections. Tuple is one of the best developer tools to work for remote programmers to collaborate when writing code. It offers a 5k-quality video stream, HD quality audio, and efficient CPU usage. For comparison, an average Tuple call uses fewer CPU resources than Chrome when it sits idle.

2. Codestream: Easy code-level discussion

One important task that boosts productivity is effortless knowledge sharing between developers when working on a project. A developer must work outside his bubble and ensure that others know what their code does or what changes they’ve made. Such communication is essential for streamlining team workflows and producing valuable work.

Codestream is a productivity tool that captures all the discussions around code and makes it effortless to do code reviews. Codestream can work with any IDE and supports every programming language, which is why any developer can use it. One of the distinguishing features of this developer tool is that it allows discussion on a code without ever requiring a pull request. All you have to do is to highlight a code block and add a comment. Codestream strengthens the quality of your code base by allowing live discussion within the production environment.

3. f.lux: For giving your eyes a break

Programming can be unforgiving to your eyes and hamper your productivity if you write code for long stretches without giving your eyes a break. f.lux offers a solution to help developers reduce eye strain when writing code in dim light or at night. The tool intelligently adapts your screen’s display color according to different times of the day to ensure that your eyes are not overly strained.

f.lux works on all operating systems – Windows, Linux, Mac, and iOS devices. To set up f.lux, you need to tell the tool what kind of lighting you are working in and where you live; the rest the tool will handle automatically. It is a fully customizable developer tool that can be adjusted to fit your work routine.

4. LightrunAutomate logs

Bugs are unavoidable for developers; no matter how well planned and impressively coded software is, it will eventually encounter bugs. The most time-consuming activity of fixing bugs is tracking the logs to replicate the bug. While it is an essential step to fix a problem, manually tracking log files is tedious. When there are no logs, things get more complicated, and reproducing the bug becomes much more difficult without enough information.

Thankfully, Lightrun is here to help developers add logs, metrics, and traces to the code base directly into the IDE or CLI in real-time. It provides the capability to developers to have code-level observability without deploying the code to a live environment. This saves much time that is wasted on testing the code after deployment. Lightrun works on monolith microservices, Kubernetes, Docker Swarms, serverless, ECS, Big Data works, and more.

5. Asana: For team and project management

Asana is one of the most widely used workplace management tools. It is utilized for streamlining communication across companies and teams. Developers are benefited from using Asana as it allows them to break down projects into tasks and set clear goals for teams. It can be integrated with hundreds of other productivity tools such as Google Drive, Outlook, and Slack. Customizing its features allows developers to change Asana per their project requirements.

Asana is one of the best productivity tools to improve communication within development teams. Analyzing and monitoring project issues eliminates the constant need for meetings, email updates, and memos. It offers customizable dashboards; activity feeds, prioritization, email integration, focus mode and individual task lists, custom calendars, notifications, and more.

Conclusion

For developers, focus and maintained workflow is critical. We hope these productivity tools can help you avoid distractions and help you manage time and tasks much more efficiently. Developers can improve code quality, collaboration, and project management. For more productivity hacks, check out this article.

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