The main attraction of firefox is its customizable environment for the users to meet their tastes and requirements in terms of themes and plugins. As themes were already available with the chrome, the introduction of extension system brings it closer to firefox in terms of customization.

Here I am listing some of the chrome extensions available for web designers & developers.

Chrome Web Developer Tools

This extension aims at replicating the Web Developer Toolbar of Firefox.

Our current goal is to develop a clone of the “Web developer toolbar” of Firefox.

The functions it offers to web designers are some standard ones like validation, disabling CSS, hiding images, outline tables and showing images with an alt description etc counting to around 40 different features.

Download Chrome Web Developer Tools

Web Developer Mini

Web Developer Mini is a handy tool which offers easy access to validate your CSS and HTML, view the Page Source, in addition to giving you direct access to BrowserShots (a screenshot generating app).

Download Web Developer Mini

Firebug Lite

This is the stripped down port of the firebug project to Chrome. Firebug Lite is a tool for web developers, that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. A similar functionality can be achieved by the inbuilt Webkit debugger.

Download Firebug Lite

Pendule

Pendule is a very useful extension that gives you a wide array of easy to use developer tools. Some of its features include: View Page Source, Color Picker, Display Ruler and Disable CSS. On top of that you also have some handy image tools: Hide Images, Show Alt Text, Show Dimensions and Show paths. And, to top it all off, it even has tools that will validate CSS, HTML and Feeds. The UI of this extension is fantastic

Download Pendule

Chrome Sniffer

Chrome Sniffer is an extension that allows you to inspect the web framework/CMS and javascript library running on any website. The extension will display an icon indicates the detected frameworks. Currently, this extension can detect up to 45 popular CMS and javascript libraries

Download Chrome Sniffer

BuiltWith Technology Profiler

BuiltWith is a web site profiler tool. Upon looking up a page, BuiltWith returns all the technologies it can find on the page. BuiltWith’s goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves.

The BuiltWith Chrome Extension lets you find out what a website is built with by a simple click on the builtwith icon!

BuiltWith technology tracking includes widgets (snap preview), analytics (Google, Nielsen), frameworks (.NET, Java), publishing (WordPress, Blogger), advertising (DoubleClick, AdSense), CDNs (Amazon S3, Limelight), standards (XHTML,RSS), hosting software (Apache, IIS, CentOS, Debian) .

It will tell you what analytical tracking system they use, their Javascript library, server information; P3P policy, if any; advertising system and document information including which version of HTML and meta text.

Download BuiltWith Technology Profiler

MeasureIt

Draw out a ruler that will help you get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

Known issues:
- There is no support on Google extension gallery.
- There are some problems with Ubuntu. Hope to fix it soon.

Download MeasureIt

Speed Tracer

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).

Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by:

* Javascript parsing and execution
* Layout
* CSS style recalculation and selector matching
* DOM Event handling
* Network resource loading
* Timer fires
* XMLHttpRequest callbacks
* Painting
* and more …

Download Speed Tracer

Eye Dropper

Eye Dropper and Color Picker extension tries to replicate Colorzilla on Chrome. The extension allows you to pick color from any webpage or from advanced color picker.

As of now there are two known major bugs, first is that sometime color is inexact and second that sometimes, part of screen show only black color.

Download Eye Dropper

IE Tab

Use Internet Explorer to display web pages in a Chrome tab. Some sites can only be displayed using IE, and with this extension you can now see those sites without leaving Chrome. The Extension is great for web developers who want to test the IE rendering engine, users who use sites with ActiveX controls, and users who want to use the explorer view for local files.

Download IE Tab

Chrome SEO

The Google Chrome SEO extension provides easy access to Search Engine Optimization Tools that can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks and other daily SEO tasks.

Download Chrome SEO

Chrome Flags

Chrome Flags displays a country flag indicating about the physical location of the websites you’re visiting. The extension also provides access to detailed information regarding the website’s servers, owners, traffic and trustworthiness.

Download Chrome Flags

Resolution Test

An extension for developers to test web pages in different screen resolutions, with an option to define your own resolutions.

Download Resolution Test

Lorem Ipsum Generator

Chrome Extension that generates random “Lorem Ipsum” text. It uses a minimalist and well looking design.

Many other extensions of this type – in other browsers – simply complicate this task, using really extensive code, XHR, etc. The main purpose of this one, is to use the less amount of code (and also memory) and help the developer/user to get the job done.

Download Lorem Ipsum Generator

Wordpress 2.8, named for noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. Overall 790 bugs have been fixed, according to the offical blog:

We also fixed over 790 bugs.

What’s New

Enhanced performance

Wordpress 2.8  is way faster to use. It provides faster loading of admin pages through script compression and concatenation. It also features jQuery 1.3.2 and TinyMCE 3.2.3. In addition there has been some improvements to database API also. The official wordpress blog says:

We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

Theme Updater – Browse new themes

With the success of core and plugin updaters, the same has been extended to themes also. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

Enhanced Code Editor

The in-built code editor with Wordpress has been enhanced to CodePress, which gives syntax highlight to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

New Widget API

Another feature of WordPress 2.8 is the revamp of the widgets section. Refreshingly, all your sidebars are visible at once (just like old times) and you can drag and drop the required widgets into them. You can have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Tag Management

A new sub-section has been added to the Posts section called “Post Tags” that contains all the tags that have been used so far in your blog. Just like categories, you can change the Tag name, Tag slug and also add description for your tags.

Other Features

• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four column.
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Option.
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment.
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module.
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows.

Related Links

Wordpress 2.8 can be downloaded at -http://wordpress.org/download/

Complete feature list & release notes at – http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8