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10 Top Chrome Extensions for Your Web Development Workflow

As web developers we work in a very fast paced industry and staying on top of things can sometimes be a challenge. That's why I believe we should take full advantage of whatever tools we have at our disposal to help keep our heads above water. Today I'm going to present ten Chrome extensions that are geared to optimizing your web development workflow, hopefully making you that little bit more productive.

What are Chrome Extensions?

As can be read on Chrome's developer portal, extensions are small software programs that can customize your browsing experience. This can be anything from a spelling and grammar checker that checks your writing as you type, to a password manager that saves your login details for your favorite sites.

There are literally thousands of extensions available for Chrome, all of which can be downloaded for free from the Chrome Web Store. You can check which extensions you currently have installed by visiting the following link in your browser: chrome://extensions/.

Why Chrome?

This article focuses on the Google Chrome browser due to its huge market share (currently 65% and rising). There are also many Chrome-based browsers which support extensions. These include Brave, Vivaldi and, coming soon, Microsoft Edge. However, we should remember that Chrome isn't the only show in town and that many of the extensions mentioned here have a Firefox and/or Opera equivalent.

Finally, before we dive into the extensions, take a minute to remember that Chrome is proprietary software published by Google. As we all know, there are privacy concerns associated with using Google products, so maybe head over to GitHub and check out the ungoogled-chromium project instead. As the name suggests, this is Google Chromium, sans integration with Google.

1. Web Developer

We'll start off with the Swiss Army knife of extensions. With over 1 million users and a 4.5 star rating on the Chrome Web Store, Web Developer is something of a must have. It adds a toolbar button to Chrome which, when clicked, displays a plethora of tools that can be used on any web page. These are grouped by category (CSS, forms, images etc) and allow you to do such things as disable JavaScript, outline images with missing alt attributes, resize the browser window, validate a page's HTML, view a page's meta tag information and much more.

You can download it here.

2. Your Framework's Developer Tools

If you're developing an app with a JavaScript framework and you're not using that framework's developer tools, then you're probably doing it wrong. Let me explain using Vue as an example.

If you have a Vue app which you need to debug, or you just want to see what's going on under the hood, then what do you do? Inspecting the page's source will show you the HTML that Vue is rendering, but there is much more to a Vue app than that. What about a component's props, data or computed properties? Or your app's state or routing? How do you inspect any of those?

The good news is that the Vue.js dev tools have you covered. Simply install the extension and open it up on a page running a development build of Vue to see exactly what is happening in your app.

Here are links to download the dev tools for the big three frameworks.

• Vue
• React
• Ember

3. Daily 2.0 - Source for Busy Developer

As we work in a fast paced industry, keeping up with news and goings on can sometimes be a challenge. Enter Daily 2.0, an extension that gathers the latest web development and tech posts from around the internet and presents them in an attractive masonry-style lay out on your new tab page.

The extension is easy to use. When you install it you are asked to pick from a bunch of categories that interest you and Daily 2.0 does the rest. Hovering over the sidebar on the new tab page allows you to filter your feed based on tags and sources.

You can get it here.

4. Toggl Button: Productivity & Time Tracker

If you're a busy freelancer, if you work remotely, or if you just need to track the time you're spending on a project, then Toggl is for you.

This extension requires you to create an account before you can use it. Once you're logged in it enables quick and easy real time productivity tracking with all the data stored in your Toggl account. It comes with a built-in Pomodoro timer, as well as integrations for a whole host of internet services (such as GitHub, Trello and Slack). One of my favorite features is that it will pop up a notification when you've been idle and the timer was running, allowing you to discard the time.

Toggl can be downloaded here.

5. Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance and quality of your web pages. You can either install it via the Chrome Web Store or, as of Chrome version 60, you can run it directly from the Audits tab of the browser's DevTools (press F12 and select Audits).

Once you have opened Lighthouse, click Generate report and optionally select which audit categories to include. Lighthouse will run the selected audits against the page, and generate a report on how well the page did. From there, you can use the failing audits as indicators of how to improve the page. Each audit also includes links to further reading and potential fixes.

Lighthouse is produced by Google, and presumably uses the same ranking factors as their search engine. This means it can offer you some of the best advice out there on how to optimize your site.

You can grab it here.

6. OneTab

The post 10 Top Chrome Extensions for Your Web Development Workflow appeared first on SitePoint.

by James Hibbard via SitePoint

How to Use the Web Share API

#395 — June 12, 2019 Read on the Web Frontend Focus How to Use the Web Share API — This API provides a way to trigger the native share dialog of a device when sharing content, such as a link, directly from a website or web app. It's mostly focused on mobile use cases so far but the latest Safari build supports it too. Ayooluwa Isaiah Are Long JavaScript Tasks Delaying Your 'Time to Interactive'? — Chrome DevTools can now visualize ‘Long Tasks’ (code that causes the main thread to freeze, breaking the user experience) making it easier to debug and optimize away any problems. Addy Osmani Image & Video Management Made for Front-End Developers — Simplify and automate the process of uploading, manipulating, optimizing, and delivering images and videos across every device at any bandwidth. Try Cloudinary. See how easy media management can be. Get your own free account today. Cloudinary sponsor The Concept of 'Micro Frontends' — A look at a pattern aroundo splitging up your large, complex, frontend codebases into simple, composable, independently deliverable apps that integrate together. Cam Jackson (ThoughtWorks) ▶  Using DevTools To Understand Modern CSS Layouts — Explains a variety of modern CSS layout techniques through live demonstrations via DevTools. Chen Hui Jing Styling in Modern Web Apps — A dive into the different ways of organizing styling in modern apps, which often have complex interfaces and design patterns. Ajay NS Mozilla Will Reportedly Launch a Paid Version of Firefox — A premium version of Firefox, offering a VPN and secure cloud storage, is expected to launch by October. Ivan Mehta 💻 Jobs JavaScript / React Performance Optimization Engineer - Exodus (Remote) — Exodus are looking for an obsessive engineer to work on improving the performance of the Exodus desktop application. Exodus Land a New Dev Job on Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Vettery 📘 News, Tutorials & Opinion Safari Web Inspector Now Includes A New CPU Usage Timeline — ...that lets devs measure a page’s CPU usage, estimate its energy impact, and more easily investigate sources of script execution that may be contributing to poor energy utilization. Joseph Pecoraro ▶  Hello Subgrid — Rachel Andrew, member of the CSS Working Group, introduces Subgrid — with various use cases, example code and thoughts on where we might see Grid going in the future. Rachel Andrew It’s Finally Possible to Code Web Apps on an iPad Pro — ...using Visual Studio Code. (Originally shared in our mobile development newsletter.) Owen Williams Exploring Domain-Driven Design at CircleCI — One thing that has helped maintain a sense of consistency has been for us to adopt a different approach to writing software: Domain-Driven Design. CircleCI sponsor An Introduction to the MediaRecorder API — Here's how to use the MediaRecorder browser API to record audio and video in the browser. Phil Nash (Twilio) 'Why We Prefer CSS Custom Properties to SASS Variables' — Some practical examples of how CSS variables can power-up your workflow. Sebastiano Guerriero CSS Grid and IE11 — A look at how a little JavaScript "helped us make peace" with CSS Grid and IE11. Valentina Versari & Tom Rothe Write HTML Like It's 1999 — A reminder of good semantic best practices to “inspire you to keep things simple”. Bradley Taunt 💡 Tip of the Week supported by Optimizing Google Fonts requests If you use Google Fonts and know in advance which letters you'll need from a particular typeface (such as if you're rendering a headline or title with an elaborate heading font), there's a technique you can use to significantly reduce load. Google Fonts lets you specify which letters you need and will only serve those as part of the font. To do this you can append a text= parameter to the end of a font request, like so: <link href="http://bit.ly/1k4Fhr6&text=Frontedcus" rel="stylesheet"> In the example above, we've requested all the letters needed to type out 'Frontend Focus'. Google claims that in some cases this technique can reduce the size of your font file request by up to 90% (in the case above, we've worked out it's a 86% drop from a 9.2KB font to a 1.3KB one) so it's a neat little optimization strategy worth looking into. This week's tip is sponsored by Percy, the all-in-one visual testing platform. Replace manual QA and catch visual UI bugs before your customers do. Get started for free. 🔧 Code, Tools & Resources html5-boilerplate: A Professional Front-End Template for Building Fast, Robust, and Adaptable Web Apps/Sites — This project has been around for several years now, but recently saw an update and remains a highly popular templating choice. H5BP lightweight-charts: Financial Lightweight Charts Built with HTML5 Canvas — If you want to replace static image charts with interactive ones that are small and fast this HTML5 charts library may be worth a look. TradingView The Open Source Conundrum: How Do We Keep the Lights On? CodeFund sponsor Cube.js: An Open Source Analytics Framework — Designed to work with large-scale data sets. Statsbot Pretty Checkbox: A Pure CSS Library to Beautify Checkbox and Radio Buttons Lokesh    🗓 Upcoming Events CSSCamp 2019, July 17 — Barcelona, Spain — A one-day, one-track conference for web designers and developers. An Event Apart, July 29-31 — Washington, D.C. — A popular three-day conference that focuses on all things relating to digital design and user experience. Front Conference, August 29-30 — Zurich, Switzerland — A two-day double-track conference for everyone involved from concept to implementation. CSSConf, September 25 — Budapest, Hungary — A community conference dedicated to the designers and developers who love CSS. ❓ Last But Not Least.. Chrome Incognito Mode No Longer Detectable:

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