10 Useful Chrome Extensions For Web Developers

April 9, 2026 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek

Whether you prefer to use Chrome or not, building anything for the web requires you to consider it. There are other browsers available, but Google Chrome is still used by a lot of the people you are building for. So, whether it’s a website, a web app, or something else, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re taking performance and user experience on Chrome into account as a web developer. Here are a few useful Chrome extensions for web developers to consider (and some bonus non-extension alternatives):

Web Developer by Chris Pederick
Chrome Developer Tools For Page Rulers
Measure It
ColorZilla
WhatFont
WAVE Evaluation Tool
Talend API Tester
Bruno
Lorem Ipsum Generator
Awesome Screenshot

1. Web Developer by Chris Pederick

The Web Developer extension will add a toolbar button to your Chrome browser with various web developer tools. It is a good place to start if you don’t already have your preferred suite of tools and extensions for Chrome. And, if you love the Web Developer extension for Firefox, then you definitely need this one. It’s the same thing and built by the same person, except it’s built to work on Chrome.

2. Chrome Developer Tools For Page Rulers

Although not technically an extension, you don’t want to ignore the Developer Tools built into Chrome. Between page speed and performance testing with Lighthouse and all the other built-in tools available, you can do a lot natively within Chrome.

When determining the pixel height and width of an element, you have a few native options in Chrome. You can always right-click and Inspect to inspect the element to see pixel height and width. You can also use the built-in Chrome Developer Tools to see rulers via the Command Menu, Settings Menu, and Device Mode.

Showing Rulers via the Command Menu

The fastest way to show rulers in Chrome is to use the Command Menu:

Press F12 while in a Chrome browser to open Developer Tools.
Press Ctrl+Shift+P on PC or Cmd+Shift+P on Mac to bring up the Command Menu.
Type Show rulers on hover.
Press Enter or click Show rulers on hover in the drop-down with suggested commands.

Showing Rulers via the Settings Menu

You can also adjust your preferences in the Developer Tools Settings Menu to show page rulers:

Open Developer Tools.
Click on the Gear Icon to enter Settings in the top-right of the console.
Go to Preferences.
Under Elements, check the box for Show rulers on hover.

Showing Rulers in Device Mode

You can also show rulers in Device Mode:

When using the Device Toolbar, open the options menu by clicking the three dots in the upper-right corner.
Select Show rulers.

3. Measure It

If you aren’t getting what you want from the built-in Developer Tools in Chrome and want to explore another option for measuring pixel widths and heights, distances, and positions for elements on web pages, consider trying the Measure It extension.

With easy click and drag selection for pixel-perfect measurement, you can get sizing and positioning where you need it to be, and edit your CSS less in order to get there. In distance measurement mode, you can see measurements for distance, offset, and angle between two points on a web page. You can also use built-in keyboard shortcuts to easily switch between box and distance measurement modes.

4. ColorZilla

If you want to try an eye dropper and color picker tool aside from what is built into Chrome Developer Tools, consider playing around with ColorZilla. Equipped with an easy-to-use color picker along with a suite of other color-related tools, you can get a color reading from any point in the browser, play around with hues, saturations, and values, identify a color palette for a website, and more.

5. WhatFont

Want to easily identify a font on a web page without having to dig into the code? Or, just love typography? The WhatFont Chrome extension can help you. Simply hover over text to see the font name label pop up. You can also click on an element to see the styles that are applied. This can help you discover fonts and styles you like on other web pages and use fonts effectively in web design in your own creations.

6. WAVE Evaluation Tool

Accessibility matters to anything you’re making publicly available on the web. The WAVE Evaluation Tool makes it easy for you to test overall accessibility and the accessibility of specific web content. You can use this tool to make sure what’s on the web complies with current accessibility standards per Web Accessibility Guidelines, ADA, and Section 508 compliance. You can also use it to identify ways to further improve accessibility on your website or web app beyond the minimum requirements for a better user experience.

7. Talend API Tester

Effective communication and connection between platforms or software are the foundations of a solid integration. APIs are the keys to achieving that, and being able to test API integrations is important. The Talend API Tester Chrome extension can help you there. Talend AI Tester used to be known as Restlet Client, and it’s like having Postman in your browser for testing APIs. Even with the free edition, you can visually interact with and test SOAP, REST, and HTTP APIs.

You can also get granular with sending and inspecting requests and validating responses. Handling complex HTTP requests is not an issue. Plus, security and authentication are fully supported. You can also insert variables to make requests dynamic. There are a lot of ways to customize tests to achieve what you need. You can even use environment variables to make your tests more reusable.

Although it is easy to import your Postman Collections, Swagger/OAS/OpenAPI, and HAR (HTTP Archive), downloading or exporting isn’t available, which can make collaboration or sharing a specific dashboard more challenging. In order to replicate in a collaborative situation and see the same results asynchronously, each party would have to recreate and run their own tests using the same variables.

8. Bruno

For another Postman alternative that isn’t a browser extension (but still deserves a place in this list because of how useful it is as an alternative), consider Bruno, a Git-native API client. In addition to having a robust free version available, Bruno is a local offline API client. Files are stored locally as folders and text files in Collections, which means you can organize them as you would code. You can even co-locate folders and files with the codebase they are relevant to.

Bruno is open source and built to work with the other tools in your stack. A major benefit is that you can share and collaborate via Git or your choice of version control system for a single source of truth that still allows everyone on your team to access the information they need. It integrates natively with any Git provider. Bruno’s easy-to-use GUI-based system allows for:

Checking Collections in/out
Pulling changes
Submitting PRs

This keeps information centralized and accurate. In a collaborative environment, this maintains a single source of truth and avoids the chaos and confusion that comes from multiple sources of truth in different locations, while still allowing for easy collaboration.

9. Lorem Ipsum Generator

Lorem ipsum is the dummy text used as a placeholder. It’s originally from the printing and typesetting industry and has been around since the 1500s. Even though there are plenty of ways to play with it, lorem ipsum is still a web standard for placeholder text. A fantastic lorem ipsum generator is https://lipsum.com/.

It’s a website and not a Chrome extension, but it’s well worth bookmarking and makes adding another extension to your browser unnecessary. Using this site, you can generate lorem ipsum starting with the standard “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” or not, designate how much you want to generate, and choose the format you want, including:

Paragraphs
Words
Bytes
Lists

10. Awesome Screenshot

It can be useful to have an easier interface for taking screenshots, editing them, and making recordings. Awesome Screenshot is a useful Chrome extension for being able to do all of those things and more. It is especially useful for getting full-page screenshots or annotating screenshots.

Plus, you can adjust the screenshot capture from the beginning by selecting whether you want a full page, just what is currently visible on the screen (wherever you are on the page), or only what you have selected. Then, you have the option to download, copy, print, or convert to PDF directly. Or, you can use the toolbar to crop, annotate, and edit the screenshot as you need to before saving and sharing.

These are just a few useful Chrome extensions for web developers. The mix of tools that are right for you will depend on what you’re doing, what you need, and the specific functions and user experiences you prefer.