If you’re a developer, you will likely already have a collection of favorite Chrome extensions you use on a daily basis. Extensions that make life easier, make you more productive or perform an essential task better than a dedicated tool. This list may build on that collection.

As the vast majority of us use Chrome, it makes sense to consider Chrome extensions. Other browsers are available but Chrome is used by 64.4% of internet users. While it isn’t big on privacy, it certainly aces productivity!

Here are some of the best extensions I use on the daily basis:

Auto Tab Discard

Auto Tab Discard automatically discards inactive tabs after a defined time period to free up memory usage of the tab and to prevent background scripts from using the computational power of your browser when the tab is not being used by the user. This extension uses the native method to discard tabs and hence does not have issues the other similar extensions might suffer from.

Dark Reader

Sometimes you find yourself as dark mode user in a barbarian website that don't have one. But thankfully we have Dark Reader that will help you avoid that problem in a good and an efficient way.
Dark Reader inverts bright colors making them high contrast and easy to read at night.
You can adjust brightness, contrast, sepia filter, dark mode, font settings and ignore-list.
Dark Reader doesn't show ads and doesn't send user's data anywhere. It is fully open-source!

Picture in Picture

Multitasking is better With Picture in picture extension that will make you continue watching a video by minimizing it and browsing other videos on the platform at the same time.

Site blocker

As we use the internet everyday our attention span shrink more and more and we can't focus any longer on our tasks. This is why we need a tool that can block certain sites (I'm talking about social media here) until we finish the job.

Daily.dev

Daily.dev isn’t a productivity tool per se, but it does make our lives much easier. It’s a news aggregator that specializes in development news. It showcases a page full of news stories, blog posts and useful pages on our chosen subject.

Daily acts like a start page and news aggregator. Select an item on the page to visit that page. Each opens in a new tab and will be a mixture of news, reviews, advice and all the good stuff that keeps us growing as developers. This is an excellent extension to use if you like to stay current.

Json Formatter

Json Formatter helps manage JSON data into a quickly recognizable hierarchy view in a browser window. Working with raw JSON data is fine when you have the time, but using this addon makes the code easier to quickly absorb and use.

Octotree

As a developer, you always browse a repo on GitHub. This extension will make your browsing experience faster.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a very effective tool for identifying the underlying technologies behind web pages. It quickly identifies web services, CMS type, analytics tools, plugins, JavaScript libraries and a whole host of other apps. If you want to know the secrets behind a page, this is one way to find out.

React Developer Tools || Vue.js devtools

React/Vue.js Developer Tools are specifically for the open source React JavaScript library/ Vue JavaScript framework. If you work with React/Vue, these extensions helps you inspect as required.

Conclusion

What I hope you take away from this article is a couple of new developer tools to make your life easier. Whether that’s by increasing productivity, solving problems or streamlining a process, there are tools here that do all those things and more.
Do you have any Chrome developer extensions to recommend?