But now that Google Chrome has it’s own little extension directory, it has become even a bigger competition and the beauty of it – it’s still in beta! In this forum post, I am going to show and suggest to you 5 Google Chrome plugins that made my life easier.

1. Firebug Lite

This is one of the most popular plug-ins for web designers using Firefox. It is not available for Chrome as well, although it is a prototype version but still works very well. Firebug allows you to explore both the HTML and the CSS source code of any website. Very useful if you are debugging your own website or just want to learn how someone else programmed his.

Extension link

2. Chrome SEO

An absolutely fantastic plug-in! Everything you need SEO-wise, it has it. You get a little Chrome SEO icon and when you press it, it gives you all the SEO information for the website you are currently on. No more using third party Google Page Rank checkers and going to the Alexa website to check the rating or to see how many backlinks a certain website or blog has. This one is a must have!

Extension link

3. Resolution Test

If you are a web designer or developer you will look at this plug-in like it is pure gold. Making your website or blog look good on all or most resolutions always presented a great problem for me. There are websites that can screenshot your own website in different resolutions but that was a slow process and this plugin is just fantastic.

Extension link

4. Measureit!

A very simple Chrome plug-in that creates a measuring tool for you to use in order to determine the dimensions of certain images, placeholders, cells, blank spaces or any other elements on a web site. It is very useful for designers, when you are trying to squeeze something into that last pixel, especially on WordPress blogs in the sidebar.

Extension link

5. AdBlock

One of the most popular all-around Chrome plug-ins. It made Firefox work faster and it makes Chrome run at lightning speeds. It will get rid of all the advertisement on websites and allow you to surf in peace, giving you faster page load speeds.

Extension link

6. Bit.ly plug-in

The most useful plug-in that I currently have installed. This one allows you to instantly shorten and share an address of a website to Twitter or to Facebook. Just click on the little bit.ly icon in the Chrome toolbar and it will do the job. Another fantastic feature of this plug-in is that when you are on Twitter.com you will get very little pop-up windows every time you hover your mouse cursor over a bit.ly (or most other shortened URLs) and you will be able to see how many clicks that link has, it’s full address where it takes you and a sentence or two of meta description. It also works like that when you hover over a persons @ name in the tweets – shows you a few sentences of description.

Extension link

7. Google Mail Checker

This plug-in displays a small icon Gmail envelope icon located right from the address bar (where all plug-in icons are implemented). Every time you get new e-mail, a number will appear next to the icon telling you how many unread e-mails you have. You could certainly live without this one but it’s very handy to have, especially for someone (like myself) that checks their e-mail every few minutes.

Extension link

8. Countdown & RemindMe

Not so popular but very useful little plug-in with a friendly interface. Countdown will let you set a countdown timer that will play a custom sound when it reaches zero. Very useful for people that spend a lot of time in Chrome and have a lot of work on their plate. I love this one!

The RemindMe plug-in is your simple note+alarm clock that is also useful if you have stuff to do, blogs to read, e-mails to send, RSS feeds to read.

Countdown extension link
RemindMe extension link

9. RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)

Official Google RSS subscription plug-in for which you will probably think: “Why isn’t this in Chrome by default?”. Well, maybe it will be in the future but for now it’s good to have it installed. It will show a little RSS icon next to the website addresses that have RSS and you will be able to subscribe to the feed by just clicking that single button.

Extension link

Conclusion

As far as I know, Chrome doesn’t notify you when there is an update available so be sure to update your browser. I had no idea I was a few versions behind and those versions didn’t have extension capabilities. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share. The question of the week is: “What are your favorite Chrome plugins?”

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