8-bitDesign

No seriously, stop that ish. Increasingly, Google’s browser, Chrome, has gotten much, much, much better than our default go-to tool for web development. However, the tooling on Chrome has been pretty weak up until now, leaving us married to some odd combination of plugins, extensions and user scripts.

That’s slowly changing, and now there’s some solid extensions on the Chrome side to help you get your job done.

So, in no particular order, the extensions:

Pendule

This is the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. In Chrome. Awesome.

Eye Dropper

• Gives you a color palette in your browser window, which is handy
• Lets you grab a current color from the page, and automagically copy it to your pasteboard.

Chrome Sniffer

This one’s interesting… this will add an icon to your URL bar indicating any particular JS libraries, CMSes, or whatnot that a given page is using.

Resolution Test

It’s a resolution switcher. Yaay! Not like we haven’t seen these before in various other browsers, but having it next to your URL bar may actually mean that you’ll use it.

RSS Subscription Extension

I have no sodding clue why this isn’t installed by default. It’s an RSS button, just like Firefox has had since version 1.5.

Install it, configure it to use Google Reader, and then forget about it until the next time you have to install Chrome.

XML Tree

Chrome doesn’t parse XML trees off the bat, opting instead to display them as plaintext, sans linebreaks.

This fixes that.

Google Tasks

Okay, maybe not a dev tool quite yet, however once Google opens an API to the service, this will become a very, very useful way to share tasks, to-do lists, etc.. Until then, it’s useful to keep your personal list of tasks close at hand.