The Best Chrome Add-ons for Web Developers

We love Google Chrome — it’s blazing fast and supports most of HTML5 and CSS 3. But when it comes to using a browser for web development tasks, it’s hard to beat Firefox. With add-ons like Firebug or the Web Developer extension, Mozilla’s browser is still the tool of choice for tweaking and testing pages. […]

We love Google Chrome -- it's blazing fast and supports most of HTML5 and CSS 3. But when it comes to using a browser for web development tasks, it's hard to beat Firefox. With add-ons like Firebug or the Web Developer extension, Mozilla's browser is still the tool of choice for tweaking and testing pages.

If you've been looking for Chrome-based replacements -- a better way to inspect code, test alternate resolutions, or quickly check a page's validation status -- the Chrome team has a new Chrome Developer Tools page with some very useful add-ons for web developers.

Sadly, there is no equivalent for Firebug (even the "light" version is no replacement for the real deal), but there are a number of great developer add-ons for Chrome that we hadn't noticed before.

Speed Tracer is a decent substitute for Yahoo's YSlow add-on for Firefox. Speed Tracer helps identify and suggest fixes for performance issues. The Web Developer extension (written by Chris Pederick, the same person who did the Firefox version) gives you quick access to validators and offers page resizing and a CSS elements viewer.

Other nice extensions include Chrome Editor, which allows you to make live edits without needing to jump between your text editor and web browser. There's also, JSonView, which lets you see JSON data, and PHP Documentation, which gives you quick access to PHP's extensive documentation.

If you're a heavy Firebug user, there's nothing here that's going to convince you to switch from Firefox to Chrome for web development. But if you've already made the switch and are looking for some additional web development tools this collection of Chrome add-ons has you covered.

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