'Net Features : google chrome

Chrome Extensions for Hyper-Productive Developers

Michael Garrity — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:00:00 GMT

One of the fastest and easiest ways to increase productivity and efficiency as a Web developer is to collect an assortment of tools that can help simplify, automate and just generally lessen the burden that different tasks add to your to-do list.

Of course, this isn't news to anyone. What may be useful to know, however, is that the popular Google Chrome Web browser offers a plethora of extensions that could be used to make life easier for developers. If you already use Chrome (and if you work on the Web, you probably do), why not check out these 17 extensions that can help dramatically increase your productivity and, hopefully, get a few extra hours of sleep, as a result.

Eye Dropper
The open source Eye Dropper extension allows users to quickly pick out specific colors from a Web page, advanced color picker or "personal color history" to use in site design and development.

NoCoffee
As a "vision simulator" plugin, NoCoffee allows developers to see how their sites will look for users with a variety of potential vision issues, such as low acuity, low contrast sensitivity, color deficiencies, glare, ghosting, snow or a partial vision block, so that they can then go back and fix their sites to better accomodate these concerns.

jQuery-Injector
With this extension, users simply have to click on their toolbars to have jQuery "injected" directly into the current page that they are working on, and afterwards they can check for successful insertion by running a jQuery command on the page from their JavaScript consoles.

Wappalyzer
This browser extension will "uncover" the technologies used on a website, so that developers can figure out how certain aspects of a site were created. Wappalyzer comes with a list of applications that it detects, which includes content management systems, Web shops, servers, JavaScript frameworks, analytics tools and more.

Code Cola
Developers can easily visually edit a Web page's CSS style with the Code Cola extension. It even comes with a collection of handy patterns to further expediate the process.

ruul. Screen ruler
This is one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" tools that is useful for any and every type of desinger. It is a simple on-screen ruler that helps users line up and measure various aspects of a Web page, including type, line height, strokes and pretty much anything else.

Page Ruler
Sort of like ruul, Page Ruler is a Chrome extension that allows developers to draw a ruler directly on a page in order to discover an area's pixel dimensions and positioning, as well as other page elements.

JSONView
With this extension, developers can rapidly view and validate a page's JSON documents with increased efficiency.

Resolution Test
As the name implies, this extension helps developers test the pages they're working on in various screen resolutions so that they can make any necessary adjustments. It even comes with an option that allows them to define their own resolutions.

Web Developer
An extension with a name like "Web Developer" has to be good, right? This will add a button to the top of a user's toolbar in his or her Chrome browser that features various tools for Web developers, including color, resizing and image tools.

YSlow
This performance tool from Yahoo will make your Web pages faster by analyzing them, grading them on one of three predefined (or user-defined) sets of rules and then suggesting ways to improve their performance based on the results.

Ripple Emulator
Ripple Emulator provides users with a multi-platform HTML5 mobile environment emulator that allows them to test the performance of their websites across a variety of mobile devices, thus reducing the challenge of trying to design for the multitude of available mobile platforms after the initial Web-based site has been created.

Python Shell
The Python scripting language aims to emphasize code readability, making it a favorite among many Web developers. With this extension, they can test Python code or regular expressions; they can even use it as a calculator.

Microformats for Google Chrome
Now, developers can easily display microformats right on their Web pages thanks to this handy extension, which supports hCard, hCalender, hReview, hReview-aggregate, hRecipe and geo.

jQuery Debugger
Working with jQuery has never been easier than with this Chrome extension, which features a Selector Inspector panel that will, not surprisingly, inspect a page's jQuery selectors and watch their matching elements as they're displayed on any website. In short, this extension was designed to help users easily understand even the most complex selectors.

DevTools Autosave
This incredibly useful little extension will automatically save any changes in CSS and/or JavaScript that were made with Chrome DevTools, meaning you'll never have to worry about losing your work again!

960 Grid System Overlay
Technically, this is an "unoffical" tool, but it still rocks. This extension allows users to overlay a 960.gs guide over a Web page that is using the 960 Grid System by simplying right-clicking on the "960" icon in their browsers. They can even change the default colors of the overlay.

Google Chrome Demolishes App Divide

Michael Garrity — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:00:00 GMT

Google's powerful Web browser Chrome has unveiled a release that brings us all a little closer to univseral Web development.

The release came with two new technologies: Web Audio API, a feature that brings some advanced audio capabilities to JavaScript, and Native Client, which allows for execution of C and C++ code within the browser. Oh, and it also seemingly erases the divide between Web and native apps.

Originally, these features had been released on the beta channel back in August, but they are now a prominent part of the Chrome experience.

Web Audio API will help developers add in audio effects to JavaScript programming that will allow them to have a little more fun with "cool" sounds, as opposed to just playing back simple files. These only appear on browsers that support Web Audio API.

It's safe to say that most developers are going to be more interested in the offical release of Native Client, which makes it possible for all Chrome users to run applications that have been written in either C or C++ securely inside their browser. It works through the use of an API Google calls "Pepper" that provides HTML5 bindings for C and C++. When Native Client apps use Pepper, they will be provdied with a set of interfaces that equip them with the necessary bindings, allowing developers to leverage their proficiency and knowledge of the native code and pump out portable, high performance Web apps.

Google says that they have plans to eventually make Native Client available to other browers as a plugin. This could pave the way for cloud-based applications to execute desktop-level codes that could be run on Google Chrome, more or less eradicating the line between Web/cloud and desktop applications.

In addtion to these two major overhauls, Google's update also presents some improvements for Mac OS X Lion users, which, as I'm sure they'll tell you, isn't the most Chrome-friendly OS available. These include fixing crash bugs and adding some "visual polish," like the new Lion scrollbars and support for full-screen mode.

Firefox and Chrome Team Up for Web App Compatibility

Michael Garrity — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If only the rest of the world could be this peaceful.

Late last week the news broke that the developers at Mozilla and Google were going to work together on a framework called Web Intents, which is designed to allow Web apps to easily become compatible with both Firefox and Chrome, each company's respective brower. Web Intents was initially conceived by Google developer Paul Kinlan.

The basis of Web Intents comes from an already existing capability in Google's Android mobile operating system. What it will do is provide Web apps with the opportunity to express a simple call for an action, such as 'share' or 'edit,' and all receiving apps will be designed to use these. To make things easier for developers, these apps will not need any specific knowledge of the APIs of the other browser. So now, there will no longer be a need to code for each specific app that one might want to access, as developers can just use these simple requests that Web Intents provides, and they are already going to be built into the browser.

The Chrome and Firefox teams are each working on integrating this functionality into their own browser while also combining their designs to use just one API for Web app developers to be able to reach both platforms.

According to Kinlan, the goal with Web Intents is "to allow developers to build applications and services that could work with each other, but not need to explicity know about each other."

Google has succeeded with similar technology in the past, as Android has utilized comparable capabilites for some time to help make life a little easier for mobile app developers. Since the company is looking to advance its Chrome browser, including attempting to bolster its Web app store, Web Intents will be coming around at a great time.

This sort of broad capability among two of the most popular browsers in the world could mean big things for the Web application development community, as it will severely diminish the time it will take to create an app and get it online and in the hands of millions of users around the world.

Chrome Gains Ground in Browser Wars

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:45:00 GMT

Google Chrome surpassed 20% of the global internet browser market during the month of June 2011 according to Internet statistics firm StatCounter.

Chrome took 20.7% of the global market, up from 2.8% in June 2009. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has fallen from 59% to 44% globally and Firefox dropped slightly from 30% to 28%.

"It is a superb achievement by Google to go from under 3% two years ago to over 20% today," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "While Google has been highly effective in getting Chrome downloaded the real test is actual browser usage which our stats measure."

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.

Current Google Chrome Market Share

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:29:00 GMT

Google released another update to its open source Chrome browser recently, and there have been some noticeable speed improvements, along with several fixes for plug-ins - namely having to do with YouTube videos and PDFs. Some tests even indicate the JavaScript performance is nearly 40 percent faster than when it was first released. While these improvements are all fine and dandy, is anyone using Chrome yet? And if so, how many?

While we only know for certain how many WebsiteMagazine.com visitors are using Chrome, we know for certain that the percentage for the month of October (2008) is 2.73%. Internet Explorer leads the way for us with 46%, followed closely (and this surprised even me) by Firefox at 44% and then Safari with 4.71% market share.

If you know your website's current Google Chrome market share, please post a comment below and share with it other Website Magazine readers. It would be interesting to see how the market share of Chrome varies by industry.

NetSuite Now Chrome Friendly

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:17:00 GMT

Business management software (ecommerce, CRM, accounting) provider NetSuite announceds its support for the Google Chrome Browser.

The new Google Chrome Browser enhances the performance speed for AJAX-powered features of NetSuite, such as eXtreme list editing, type-ahead lookups, rich text editing, drag-and-drop and quick-add portlets.

"At NetSuite, we strive to offer our customers the latest innovations that will enable the greatest degree of choice, flexibility and productivity," said Per Jakobsen, Vice President of Product Management at NetSuite. "We salute Google for the innovation they've offered in their new Chrome Browser and are pleased to be able to offer early support for Chrome to all NetSuite and OpenAir customers."

Google Chrome Market Share

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:13:00 GMT

Analytics service Get Clicky is tracking the global market share of Chrome, Google's new browser. As of September 3rd, 2008 at 7:45 PST, the market share was 2.72052% among the services 45,000 websites GetClick monitors. Expect that number to fluctuate over the coming days and weeks. Chrome currently only works on Vista and XP, but as additional operating systems come on board, it will be increasingly important to test your site design in the Chrom browser.