The best Chrome extensions for developers are the few you open daily. A developer's browser fills up fast, and then one day a page loads slowly and the culprit is one of twenty toolbar icons.
The best Chrome extensions for developers
| Extension | Job | Users | Rating (count) |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoFullPage | Full-page screenshots | 11,000,000 | 4.89 (84,154) |
| Tampermonkey | User scripts | 12,000,000 | 4.73 (73,044) |
| React Developer Tools | React debugging | 5,000,000 | 3.95 (1,642) |
| ColorZilla | Colour picker | 4,000,000 | 4.59 (3,940) |
| FireShot | Screenshots and PDF | 3,000,000 | 4.80 (52,424) |
| WhatFont | Font inspector | 3,000,000 | 4.01 (2,052) |
| Wappalyzer | Tech stack lookup | 3,000,000 | 4.55 (1,973) |
| Tag Assistant | Check Google tags | 3,000,000 | 3.91 (1,315) |
The store files Tampermonkey under Workflow & Planning, but every developer we know treats it as a dev tool.
Counts follow our Chrome extension market research habit: record each number with the date you saw it.
A strange thing about the category
Sort the Developer Tools category by users and you get some surprises. Several of the top spots on 3 Oct 2026 were security and enterprise tools that companies or banks deploy, not tools developers picked for themselves.
Those are endpoint agents a company pushes to staff machines. Their low ratings come from people who never chose them. So sorting by users alone gives you a list of IT mandates, not favourites.
You can check these figures yourself on the Developer Tools category page.
Debugging and inspection
React Developer Tools comes from Meta and is close to required for React work (here are the React docs for it).
Its 3.95 rating came from 1,642 people as of 3 Oct 2026, and low ratings on dev tools often come from version mismatches after framework updates.
AI sidebars also help with code questions: see the best AI Chrome extensions.
ColorZilla and WhatFont answer the two questions front-end work asks all day: what colour is that, and what font. ColorZilla rates higher, at 4.59.
Screenshots
GoFullPage and FireShot both capture whole pages. Each has well over 50,000 ratings and rates above 4.7, so you can't really go wrong.
Keep one screenshot tool, not two. Duplicates fight over the same shortcut.
Where Ext Watch fits
We're biased, so keep that in mind. If you build extensions, Ext Watch shows each listing's manifest version, permissions and update date. Any extension page puts them next to users and ratings.
For shipping your own, read what the Chrome Web Store API can do.
Open your extensions page today and switch off three you forgot you had.
Questions people ask
What Chrome extensions do web developers use most?
Among picks in our 3 Oct 2026 crawl, Tampermonkey and GoFullPage led with 12M and 11M users.
Do too many extensions slow Chrome down?
Each extension can run code on pages you visit, so fewer active ones usually helps. Disable what you haven't used this month.
Why is React Developer Tools rated under 4?
We can't read review text, so we can't say for sure. Version mismatches after framework updates are a common reason for low ratings on debug tools.
Where these numbers come from
- react.devReact Developer Tools docsAccessed 3 Oct 2026
Part of our guide: Chrome Extension Market Research: A Step-by-Step Method. More in Market research.
1,182 new extensions in the last 30 days in Developer Tools. See them all.
Users, ratings and new launches per niche, from our own crawl. Updated 3 Oct 2026 from our Chrome Web Store crawl
