Useful Developer Extensions for Chrome

Carolina Usbeck - September 28, 2010

Do you often make updates to your site and wish you could change the look and feel in the live site without making changes to the site files? Google Chrome provides helpful extensions that when combined, allow you to achieve great changes to the site.

Below are a list of some very useful extensions and how you can use them to perform changes.

IE tab:
This extension is a wonderful addition for developers to cross browser check the look of the site in IE browser without having to installing the actual browser. Chrome will change the current tab being viewed to an IE tab.

Eye Dropper:
The Eye dropper is an extension that allows you to obtain colors in Hex value from the current page being viewed. One of its features provides a history of the colors you have selected from a webpage; this is a great way to be able to reuse the color without having to use the eyedropper twice to know its value. The only restriction faced, was using the eyedropper on Google pages, since you are not allowed to retrieve any color from Google pages due to a Google Chrome policy.

Measure it:
This tool helps you get measurements in pixel width and height that can be very useful when making updates to a website. These changes can include changing the width of the entire website, an image or a container of contents, this being a table or a div.

Awesome Screenshot:
This extension allows you to save a page and perform a crop, add text, lines and circles that help you illustrate the changes you would like the page to have. This can be a very useful tool to communicate between clients & designers as well as developers & designers. The tool also provides a back function to undo any of the additions made to the page. You can then right click and save the image as jpg.

Stylebot:
This is an open source and a very user friendly tool, which allows you to change the styles of a website as well as remove content from the page. It allows the selection of tags and the ability to change their color, font size, location on the page as well as visibility. This is a tool that can come in handy when requested to make quick changes for review before implementing the actual change.  

When combining some of these tools together you can create a great and fast work environment when it comes to making style updates to sites as well and saving a jpeg of the changes with comments on each of the changes. These tools can also help show clients how a few changes can make their site load faster, as well as explain in detail changes that will help the site be more search engine friendly.