Chrome is the up-and-coming star of the browser world. Already used by the tech-savvy and speed-loving developers and designers of the world, it is slowly finding its way into the general populous. On Freelance Advisor, Chrome has just surpassed Safari and now the third most popular browser.
We used Chrome extensively when putting together our new site, Contractor Advisor, and found the following tools indispensable when designing, populating and tweaking the site.
Firebug
Perennial favourite of Firefox users, Firebug is now available for Chrome, and provides all the same functionality and awesome usefulness. Providing access to just about every element of a page’s design (HTML, CSS, Java etc.), and also allows you to tweak CSS elements on-the-fly, great for those single-pixel tweaks to your design.
CSScan
Similar to Firebug, but a little more design-centric, CSScan will allow you to mouse-over page elements and give you a quick glance at which div the element is contained in, font attributes and style details. Exceptionally useful for super-quick design investigations.
Eye Dropper
Another simple, quick, but insanely helpful tool – a small extension that will allow you to pick an area of the page an instantly get the hexadecimal number for that colour. Every wondered what the Freelance Advisor orange is? Of course you have – #f48221!
SEO Site Tools
Although this tool can’t actually help you with any design while building your site, it can be extremely useful when it comes to launch and promotion. A popup will give you a quick snippet of how Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are indexing your site. It also contains an incredibly handy “Suggestions” tab, which will lay out in simple terms what improvements could be made to your site’s SEO.
Awesome Screenshot
For once a product name that perfectly reflects our views on it. This one is for all the project managers out there who are constantly suggesting tweaks and changes to a team of developers and designers. Using this tool you can capture a snippet of a screen, the whole visible area, or the entire page, creating one long view of the whole page, perfect for hundreds of annotations. The annotating element, by the way, couldn’t be simpler. You can draw arrows, boxes, insert text or blur an area, then download or share the image. I’m completely serious when I say that this extension has saved me literally several years in development time.
Download Awesome Screenshot here.
Any other extensions you use every day? Let us know in the comments!
