10 best Google Chrome Add-ons for web developers

For a long time I asked myself this question and I'm sure many of you still do. There are a few reasons why Chrome has an advantage over Firefox. First and foremost, it uses up fewer resources.

Firefox can use up even 1 GB memory in some cases. Today's computers are powerful enough, that's true, but it's still neat if you can run multiple programs without slowing your computer down.

Another advantage are the Chrome apps you can install for free from the chrome web store. We are not talking about smaller extensions here, but full-blown applications you can run inside your web browser. Many of them are very powerful and fully compatible with your Google account. You can use that for your advantage and customize your Chrome browser to be a complete office workshop.

But if Google Chrome is so great, why still use Firefox? Well, there are far less extensions for Chrome available than for Firefox. You can find a Firefox extension for absolutely everything .

Another reason is Firebug. To many people this won't be a good enough reason to stick with Firefox. But I'm sure any web developer or programmer will agree with me that this is a very important reason.

There are similar extensions for Chrome, even Firebug has a lite version for it, but no Google Chrome extension is even remotely as good as Firebug for Firefox.

MeasureIt, the popular add-on for Firefox, is now also available as a Google Chrome extension.

The extension kept all of its features. So you can still draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels. Each webpage element can be easily and accurately measured with this little tool.

Snippy allows you to grab snippets of web pages and save them for future use. You can also upload the just saved snippets to Google Docs so you can have them available on every device you use.

Or if you don't like Google Docs, you can upload it to your SnipBin account. This Google Chrome Add-on is very useful for everyone, who wants to quickly save something he just saw on the web.

Pendule is a set of Google Chrome developer tools, similar to the Firefox web developer toolbar. It allows working with Stylesheets, Forms, Images, HTML etc. Ia includes some very useful tools like a color picker or a ruler.

It's one of the best Google Chrome extensions for web development, but sadly it's far from replacing Firebug.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome Add-on, that can help you fix any performance problems in your web applications.

It identifies problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style re-calculation, DOM event handling, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks and much more.

It's also the perfect tool to optimize the loading speed of your web pages. If you wonder why that is important, Google is known to penalize slow loading pages. So if your page loads slow, it will be harder to get a good rank on Google.

Picnik is an online photo editing service.It's very powerful and most of its features are free to use. Their Google Chrome Add-on gives you even more options right at the reach of a mouse click.

It lets you easily edit images you come across while browsing the web. You can make a snapshot of a web page you are viewing and open it in Picnik for easy editing, annotation and sharing. You can also do the same thing for every image on your current browser page. This tool is very useful in many situations.

Resolution Test is a Google Chrome extension to test web pages in different screen resolutions. It includes a list of commonly used screen resolutions. But you are available to customize that list. It also gives users the option to turn on Google Browser Size.

Csscan offers an overview of the CSS properties of the element, your mouse cursor is hovering.

Every time you want to look at the CSS properties of a page, you just enable this extension by clicking a button and you'll be instantly able to watch at every CSS property of every element just by hovering over it. It's actually a very useful tool despite of lacking some more features.

Eye Dropper allows you to pick colors from web pages, an advanced color picker or your own color history. Basically you can find out the color of every webpage element with the exception of flash elements and other embedded objects of course.

PHP Code Editor is not an on-site plugin but rather a Google Chrome application. But it still deserves to be on that list. It's a web-based PHP code editor.

For developers using PHP this is a perfect app. This apps shows up a web-based interface from where you can edit your code. No matter where you are you can get your project done.
It has a lot of useful features.

Firebug Lite provides the rich visual representation we are used to see in Firebug when it comes to HTML elements, DOM elements, and Box Model shading. It provides also some cool features like inspecting HTML elements with your mouse and live editing CSS properties.

It is a good addition to the other Chrome developer tools. But sadly it's not a substitution for Firebug, far from it. If you ever used the JavaScript version of Firebug Lite you know what I'm talking about.

Firebug Lite for Google Chrome is basically the same thing, except it doesn't need an internet connection to work.