Turn Your Chrome Browser Into A Free Web Developer Toobox

Use Google Chrome to turn your browser into a web development toolbox. There is a broad range of tools that can allow you to bypass the expensive Adobe Web Standard suite of software and load up your web browser with some pretty hot tools for web design. Granted, this can also be done with Mozilla's Firefox web browser, but for now we will focus on Google's Chrome browser.

To start, explore the extensions marketplace for Google Chrome at chrome.google.com/extensions/featured/web_dev. If you make it to the extensions homepage, from the left hand menu select the FEATURED > WEB DEVELOPMENT option to find the available tools.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/featured/web_dev

There is a mini arsenal of great tools designed for the Chrome Browser to be had from this marketplace. This is a fantastic alternative to high-end software options for the Mac and PC. This could be a godsend for small businesses trying to get off the ground but coping with the challenges of  growing pains and software licenses for web design. One of the great aspects of this approach is that you can basically build a web development workbench within about a half hour simply by installing some free  add-ons to your web browser.

Here are a few recommendations:

Editor
Easily edit HTML right inside your web browser. It provides a quite handy grouping of code tags and a wide text field that displays above your page.

Picnik
Capture web pages and edit images within your web browser using this great application, Picnik. For simple image editing tasks, this is a very speedy and efficient alternative to using Photoshop or Fireworks.

Web Developer
Adds a toolbar button with various web developer tools very similar to the Firefox Web Developer extension. It has some quite handy gadgets, including a CSS panel, Forms panel and a wide variety of image focused functions such as "find broken images."

There are a great many for nifty tools, such as:

• CSS Reloader
• A JavaScript Tester
• PHP Documentation
• JSonView
• A validity icon in the address bar allowing you quick access using  Ctrl+Alt+V to validate the current page.