13 Chrome extensions everyone should know
Chrome extensions are handy everyday helpers, even for those who don't exactly work as a QA engineer or in the IT industry. Here are 13 recommendations for Chrome extensions.
For me as a Quality Assurance Engineer, Chrome Extensions are a great relief in my daily work. But even if you don't work in quality assurance or even in IT, browser extensions are handy everyday helpers. These are my 13 favorite extensions that I use every day. I wouldn't want to miss any of them and I recommend everyone to try them out as well!
1 – Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder
The number one must-have tool. It’s an easy and fast screenshot and screen recording extension with the option to capture the whole or some part of the page of any size. With this extension, you can edit pictures with a variety of tools and there are a lot of options to explore. It’s really useful!
2 – Ghostery – Privacy Ad Blocker
We all need an ad blocker and Ghostery is one that allows privacy when browsing through web content. It blocks ads, stops trackers from collecting data, speeds up the page load, and optimizes page performance by automatically blocking and unblocking trackers to meet page quality criteria. There is a simple and detailed view of the extension.
From the perspective of QA, ad-blockers are particularly useful for testing because we need to see what’s going on when it’s activated. Unfortunately, ad-blockers may also break something on a web app. But overall, it’s still recommended you use one.
3 – Check My Links
This is a quicklink checker tool. As the name says, the Check My Links extension is crawling and searching for broken links on a web page.
4 – ColorZilla
Easy to use color picker extension. This is something you probably don’t need every day but is handy to have. ColorZilla comes with a classic color picker, a CSS gradient generator, a copy-to-clipboard, and some more cool options.
5 – CSS Peeper
This beautiful CSS extract add-on allows you to dig deep. It gathers info about styles, fonts, and load time in a well-organized way. You can see all page colors and assets, all with the option to export them.
This extension is really useful and IMO every QA engineer who is testing web apps and pages should have it.
6 – Page load time
This easy-to-use extension gives you some info about – as you may guess – page load time. When the extension is active, it measures the load time and displays it in the toolbar.
7 – WAVE Evaluation Tool
This web accessibility evaluation tool provides visual feedback about your web content. It injects icons and indicators into the page and tells you how accessible the content is. Of course, accessibility can’t be measured with an automated tool alone. WAVE facilitates human evaluation and educates you about accessibility issues. It’s very easy to use.
8 – Web Developer
This extension adds a toolbar button with various web developer tools and is awesome. There are a bunch of options to play and try everything. For example, you can disable JavaScript, manage notifications, block pop-ups, clear your cache …
Or you can disable or add cookies, view and edit CSS, print styles, custom window sizes, and more and more … There are just too many options to write all of them down, so go and check it! :-)
9 – Bug Magnet
A must-have QA tool. The Bug Magnet extension is for exploratory testing. Good for forms and things like that. Right-click on a page in some form and easily insert some placeholder text in different languages and with special characters, wrong email addresses or URLs, white space, etc.
10 – Lighthouse
This web page performance extension shows how a web page should be improved. Lighthouse gives you an overview of performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. There is also a detailed view of each of these options.
11 – IE Tab
This extension simulates Internet Explorer with different versions. That’s useful sometimes as you don’t have to use Internet Explorer but can continue working in Chrome while testing. des Testens in Chrome weiterarbeiten können.
12 – Selenium IDE
This is a simple and handy automation tool. With Selenium IDE, users can record or manually create automation tests and make processes faster. It gives you plenty of options to improve and speed up testing.
13 – Grammarly for Chrome
We all know what Grammarly is and we all need Grammarly.
