Browser Plugins
According to the newest reports, we spend online almost 24 hours a week. It would be great if such a long stay on the Web was as comfortable and efficient as possible. In this article, I will present some of the plugins that make browsing the Internet better, both at work and home.
General purpose plugins
Health
If you stare at a screen many hours a day, it is utterly important to reduce eye strain. I find the two below plugins extremely useful and use both of them interchangeable. Combining them allows you to adjust brightness, contrast, sepia, and grayscale. Moreover, they offer dark (night), light and reseda mode, so almost every website can be read in a condition that suits you the best.
Knowledge
The world is developing so fast that we need to constantly learn to adapt to it. So why don’t we learn something interesting while opening a new tab? Or why don’t we check a definition of a word we’ve just read? There are two plugins that offer us exactly such features.
Language
I bet you visit websites from all over the world and write messages in foreign languages. It would be awesome to check the message before you send it, or translate a word without leaving a website. Thanks to Google and Grammarly such things become possible.
Tabs
How many tabs do you have open right now? Probably at least 3 or much more. If you belong to people (like me) that click on many various links because you want to deepen your knowledge or read something later, you will find the below plugins particularly useful. Read Later allows you to quickly save a website to a handy list and open it later. With OneTab you can close all the open tabs with just one click and re-open them again whenever you want.
Developer plugins
Elements view in DevTools is a good choice if you want to get plenty of information about the structure of a website. However, if you just want to quickly navigate through the DOM and get a grasp of the classes, the HTML DOM Navigation plugin will be even better. It allows you to view the node tree on the mouse hover on any element in the page. Moreover, you can immediately see the top five ancestors of an element or view the tree format of a tag.
According to Wikipedia, JSON “ is an open-standard file format that uses human-readable text”. Even though the format is always human-readable, it is not always easy to read. Responses from servers are usually raw strings that are difficult to read. With the help of JSON Formatter, the JSONs you see in the browser are properly formatted out-of-the-box — so you can simply see the structure of the response and immediately know what is going on.
Have you ever wondered what technologies are used on the websites you browse? Wappalyzer is a plugin that uncovers those technologies! It detects content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and many more. Now you can know what should you learn in order to be able to develop your favorite website :)
You finish a task and check if it works on your favorite browser. Everything looks good. However, you have to check if it also works correctly on IE. “Surprisingly”, it doesn’t and you have to fix it.
Have you ever had such a situation and regretted that you did not open IE earlier? If so, you will appreciate the IE Tab plugin. It exactly emulates IE by using its rendering engine directly within Chrome so you can do the testing without opening any extra browser!
Thank you for reading and enjoy surfing!
