Top 20 'IDE-Level-Up' Chrome Extensions to explore for Developers Turning Their Browser into a Powerhouse in 2025 - Goh Ling Yong
Hey there, fellow developers! Let's be honest—how much of your workday is spent inside a web browser? For most of us, it's the central hub for everything from Stack Overflow deep-dives and GitHub pull requests to testing our latest creation. The browser isn't just a tool; it's our digital workshop. But are you using it to its full potential?
While our trusty IDEs like VS Code or JetBrains are packed with features, our browsers often remain in their "out-of-the-box" state. This is a massive missed opportunity. Your browser can be so much more than a simple renderer for HTML and CSS. With the right set of tools, you can transform it into a powerful, extension-driven environment that rivals your local development setup, streamlining your workflow and saving you countless hours.
That's why we're diving deep into the world of Chrome extensions. Forget the generic lists from years past. For 2025, we're focusing on the "IDE-Level-Up"—a curated collection of 20 powerhouse extensions that will supercharge your debugging, designing, and deployment processes. Ready to turn your browser into the ultimate developer command center? Let's get started.
1. React Developer Tools
React Developer Tools is the non-negotiable, first-install extension for anyone working with React. Maintained by the core React team at Meta, it integrates directly into your Chrome DevTools, adding two invaluable tabs: "Components" and "Profiler." The Components tab lets you inspect the React component hierarchy, view their props and state in real-time, and even modify them on the fly to see how your UI reacts.
The Profiler tab is where the real magic happens for performance tuning. It allows you to record interactions and see exactly which components re-rendered, why they re-rendered, and how long they took. This is crucial for hunting down performance bottlenecks and optimizing your application. If you’re building with React, this tool isn't just helpful—it's essential.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Highlight updates when components render" feature in the extension's settings. This will visually flash a border around components as they re-render, giving you an immediate, intuitive understanding of what's changing on the screen.
2. Vue.js devtools
Just as React has its official tool, so does Vue. The Vue.js devtools is the definitive extension for any Vue developer. It provides deep introspection into your Vue applications, allowing you to debug with precision. It adds a "Vue" tab to your DevTools, where you can explore the component tree, inspect and edit component data, props, and computed properties live.
Beyond simple inspection, this extension gives you powerful features for state management. You can time-travel debug your Vuex or Pinia stores, seeing every mutation and its effect on your application's state. It also includes a routing tab to inspect your Vue Router setup and an event inspector to see custom events being emitted from your components. It’s your all-in-one dashboard for everything happening under the hood of your Vue app.
- Pro Tip: In the Vuex/Pinia tab, you can "commit" or "revert" specific mutations. This is incredibly useful for isolating bugs by stepping backward and forward through your application's state changes without having to refresh the page.
3. Lighthouse
Built directly into Chrome DevTools but also available as an extension, Lighthouse is Google's gold standard for auditing web pages. It runs a comprehensive suite of tests against any URL and provides a detailed report on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. This is your one-stop-shop for getting a high-level health check on your site.
As developers, we often get hyper-focused on functionality, but Lighthouse forces us to consider the user experience. Is your site fast enough? Is it accessible to users with disabilities? Is it following modern web standards? Lighthouse answers these questions with actionable feedback, providing specific opportunities for improvement, like "Eliminate render-blocking resources" or "Image elements do not have explicit width and height."
- Pro Tip: Don't just run Lighthouse on your homepage. Run it on key pages in your user journey, such as a product details page, a checkout form, or a blog post. Performance and accessibility can vary wildly across different templates.
4. Wappalyzer
Ever landed on a stunning website and thought, "I wonder what they used to build this?" Wappalyzer is your answer. This extension acts like an x-ray for the web, instantly identifying the technology stack of any website you visit. With a single click, it can reveal the CMS (WordPress, Contentful), framework (React, Vue, Next.js), UI libraries (Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS), analytics tools (Google Analytics), and much more.
For developers, this is an incredible tool for research and learning. You can see what technologies successful companies are using, discover new libraries to try, and get a better understanding of the modern web ecosystem. It’s also invaluable when you're taking over a new project and need a quick overview of its technical foundation without diving into the codebase.
- Pro Tip: Use Wappalyzer's "Technologies" page on their website to see trends. You can look up a technology like "Next.js" and see which popular sites are using it, giving you real-world examples of its implementation.
5. VisBug
Created by Google, VisBug is often described as a "Firebug for designers," and it's a front-end developer's dream. This open-source extension brings an incredible suite of design and editing tools directly to any webpage. Activate it, and you can move elements around, edit text, change colors, measure distances, and check alignments—all with a beautiful, intuitive UI.
Forget the cycle of "tweak CSS in DevTools, copy, paste into my editor, refresh." With VisBug, you can treat any website like a Figma or Sketch artboard. It’s perfect for rapid prototyping, fixing tricky alignment issues, or collaborating with designers by making visual changes live in the browser. It helps bridge the gap between design and development by letting you interact with the DOM visually.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Guides" tool within VisBug to check for alignment issues. You can drop guides from any element to see if other elements line up perfectly on the page.
6. ModHeader - Modify HTTP Headers
When you're working with APIs, you often need to test different scenarios by changing HTTP request headers. Maybe you need to inject an Authorization token, test a specific Accept-Language, or modify a User-Agent. ModHeader makes this incredibly simple. Instead of using complex tools like cURL or Postman for every small test, you can modify request and response headers directly in your browser.
This is a lifesaver for testing different authentication states, A/B testing features controlled by headers, or debugging CORS issues. You can set up different profiles for different projects or tasks, enabling and disabling them with a single click. It's a simple utility that solves a very common and often frustrating problem.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Filter" feature to apply a header modification to only specific URLs (e.g., your API endpoints), so you don't accidentally send custom headers to every site you visit.
7. Octotree - GitHub code tree
Navigating large repositories on GitHub can be a pain. Clicking into folder after folder to find a single file is slow and inefficient. Octotree solves this by providing a file tree sidebar, just like in your favorite IDE, directly on the GitHub website.
This completely transforms the GitHub browsing experience. You can quickly search for files, see the entire project structure at a glance, and navigate the codebase with ease. It also supports private repositories and GitHub Enterprise. For anyone who spends a significant amount of time reading code on GitHub, this extension is a massive productivity booster. I know that I, Goh Ling Yong, find it indispensable for quick code reviews.
- Pro Tip: In the Octotree settings, you can connect it to your GitHub account to get an enhanced experience on private repositories and customize the theme to match your preference (e.g., dark mode).
8. CSS Peeper
Tired of digging through nested rules in the DevTools "Styles" panel to figure out what CSS is being applied to an element? CSS Peeper is a design-focused extension that presents an element's styles in a clean, organized, and beautifully designed panel.
When you inspect an element with CSS Peeper, you'll see everything you need at a glance: font properties, colors, dimensions, and more. It even has a fantastic "Assets" tab that lets you view and export all the images or SVGs used on the page. It's the perfect tool for when you need to quickly check the styling of an element without getting lost in the weeds of the DevTools.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Colors" tab in the CSS Peeper panel. It will extract and display a palette of all the colors used on the current page, which is fantastic for ensuring design consistency or quickly grabbing a hex code.
9. Fake Filler
As developers, we spend an absurd amount of time filling out forms for testing. Name, email, address, password—it's repetitive and tedious. Fake Filler is a brilliant extension that does it all for you with one click. It intelligently populates all form inputs with realistic, randomized fake data.
It can handle text inputs, radio buttons, dropdown menus, and checkboxes. You can customize the type of data it generates (e.g., specific name formats, email addresses) to match your application's validation rules. This simple tool can save you minutes on every testing cycle, which adds up to hours over the course of a project.
- Pro Tip: In the Fake Filler options, you can set custom rules for fields based on their
name,id, orclass. This is great for filling fields that require specific formats, like a phone number or a postal code.
10. daily.dev | The Homepage for Developers
Staying up-to-date in the fast-moving world of tech can feel like a full-time job. daily.dev makes it effortless by replacing your new tab page with a curated feed of the best developer news, blog posts, and articles from hundreds of sources.
The feed is personalized to your interests—whether you're into web development, AI, DevOps, or mobile. It's a fantastic way to discover new tools, learn about emerging trends, and read insightful articles without having to actively search for them. It turns a mindless habit (opening a new tab) into a productive moment of learning.
- Pro Tip: Customize your feed by adding tags for the technologies you care about most (e.g., #react, #rust, #docker). This ensures your daily digest is always relevant to your work.
11. Axe DevTools - Web Accessibility Testing
Web accessibility (a11y) is not a "nice-to-have"—it's a critical part of building inclusive and professional web applications. Axe DevTools is the leading extension for accessibility testing. It integrates into your DevTools and performs a comprehensive audit of your page, identifying accessibility violations based on the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards.
The tool doesn't just point out errors; it explains why they are a problem and provides guidance on how to fix them. It can catch issues like missing alt text, poor color contrast, and improper ARIA role usage. Using Axe DevTools regularly helps you build accessibility into your workflow from the start, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
- Pro Tip: Enable the "Highlight" feature to visually see exactly where the accessibility issues are located on the page, making them much easier to identify and debug.
12. Grepper
We all use Google to find code snippets, but Grepper takes it a step further. When you search for a technical problem, Grepper displays relevant code examples directly on the search results page, saving you from having to click through multiple links.
The community-driven aspect is its superpower. Developers can upvote helpful snippets and even contribute their own answers. Over time, it learns what solutions are most trusted for specific problems. It's like having a miniature, curated Stack Overflow embedded in your Google search.
- Pro Tip: You can save snippets you find useful to your personal Grepper account, creating a searchable, cloud-based library of code solutions that you can access from anywhere.
13. JSON Viewer
APIs often return data in JSON format, which, in its raw form, is just a wall of unformatted text in the browser. JSON Viewer is a simple but indispensable extension that automatically formats and syntax-highlights JSON responses, making them readable and easy to navigate.
It presents the JSON in a collapsible tree view, allowing you to drill down into nested objects and arrays. It also includes themes and line numbers. If you ever work with APIs directly in your browser, this tool will save you from a lot of headaches and squinting.
- Pro Tip: You can click on any key or value in the formatted view to copy its path, which is extremely helpful when you need to reference a deeply nested property in your code.
14. WhatFont
Ever come across a website with beautiful typography and wondered what font they were using? WhatFont is the quickest and easiest way to find out. Simply activate the extension, hover over any text on the page, and it will instantly tell you the font family, size, weight, and even the color.
This is a fantastic tool for both developers and designers. It helps you get inspiration for your own projects, ensure brand consistency, and debug font-related CSS issues. It's a lightweight, single-purpose tool that does its job perfectly.
- Pro Tip: After hovering to identify a font, click on it. WhatFont will open a more detailed panel with information like line height, style, and a text sample.
15. ColorZilla
A classic that remains essential, ColorZilla is the ultimate color tool for your browser. Its core feature is an advanced eyedropper that lets you pick any color from any website with pixel-perfect precision. Once you've picked a color, it's copied to your clipboard in the format of your choice (HEX, RGB, etc.).
But it goes far beyond a simple eyedropper. It includes a color history, a palette viewer, and even a CSS gradient generator. It's the Swiss Army knife for anything color-related, saving you from having to open a separate design application just to grab a color code.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Webpage Color Analyzer" feature. It scans the entire page and generates a complete color palette, which is great for understanding a site's design system.
16. Responsively Viewer
Testing responsive design can be a clunky process of resizing your browser window or using the built-in DevTools device mode. Responsively Viewer streamlines this by allowing you to preview a webpage on multiple device screens, side-by-side, in a single window.
You can see how your layout looks on an iPhone, a Google Pixel, an iPad, and a standard desktop all at once. Even better, your scrolls, clicks, and other interactions are mirrored across all devices simultaneously. This makes it incredibly efficient to find and fix responsive bugs.
- Pro Tip: The extension has a built-in screenshot tool that can capture the full page of all devices in your view with a single click, perfect for sharing progress with your team or clients.
17. Clear Cache
Sometimes, the simplest tools are the most useful. Clear Cache does exactly what its name suggests: it clears your browser cache and other browsing data with a single click. As a developer, you're constantly fighting with cached versions of your CSS, JavaScript, or images.
Instead of navigating through Chrome's settings menu every time, this extension puts a button right on your toolbar. You can customize exactly what data you want to clear (cache, cookies, history, etc.) and for what time period. It's a small but significant quality-of-life improvement.
- Pro Tip: Configure the extension's options to clear cache "from all time" by default, so you never have to worry about old assets sticking around.
18. EditThisCookie
Cookies are a fundamental part of web applications, but managing them can be tricky. EditThisCookie is a powerful cookie manager that lets you add, delete, edit, search for, and block cookies with a user-friendly interface.
This is invaluable for debugging authentication flows, testing personalization features, or simply understanding what data a site is storing on your machine. You can easily export your cookies in JSON format for use in other tools like Postman or import them to replicate a specific user session. Here on the Goh Ling Yong blog, we often use it to test different user states for our custom features.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Block cookies" feature to prevent a specific site from setting any new cookies, which is useful for testing how your application behaves for users with strict privacy settings.
19. Redux DevTools
For applications built with Redux (or other state management libraries that support it, like NgRx or Zustand), the Redux DevTools extension is an absolute game-changer. It provides a debugging platform for your application's state, allowing you to inspect every action and the resulting state change.
Its most famous feature is "time-travel debugging," which lets you step backward and forward through actions to see exactly how your state evolved. You can even "cancel" actions or fire new ones directly from the extension to test different scenarios without reloading the page. It turns the black box of state management into a transparent, debuggable process.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Chart" view to get a visual, tree-like representation of your state object. This can be much easier to parse than the raw JSON view for complex, nested state.
20. Web Vitals
While Lighthouse gives you a one-time audit, the Web Vitals extension provides real-time feedback on Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These are the key metrics Google uses to measure user experience.
The extension provides a constant, unobtrusive overlay that shows you the scores for the page you're on. It turns green, yellow, or red depending on whether you're meeting the "good," "needs improvement," or "poor" thresholds. This is fantastic for getting immediate feedback on the performance impact of your changes as you develop.
- Pro Tip: The extension's overlay also provides debug information for CLS, showing you exactly which elements on the page are shifting and contributing to a poor score.
Your Browser, Your Powerhouse
Your browser is more than just a window to the internet; it’s an active and essential part of your development environment. By thoughtfully curating your extensions, you can bridge the gap between your editor and your live application, creating a seamless and powerful workflow. The 20 extensions on this list are designed to save you time, reduce frustration, and ultimately help you build better, faster, and more accessible websites.
Don't just install them all at once. Pick a few that address your biggest pain points and integrate them into your daily routine. You’ll be amazed at how much more efficient you can be when your tools are perfectly tailored to your needs.
Now, I want to hear from you! What are your can't-live-without Chrome extensions for development? Did I miss your favorite? Share your top picks in the comments below—let's build the ultimate developer toolkit together
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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