Magical Browser Extensions For Software Testers

Modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, MS-Edge are giving tons of features and functionalities, and to increase those functional capabilities Add-On/Extensions are something we can add to the browsers.

As a QA Engineer, I am always keen to identify and try out different tools but for many of us, it is always difficult to install a particular software in our office laptops as we have to go through a set of security measures to install a particular software. So I found that rather than installing new software all the time, We can look for chrome extensions that do the same work as the normal tools do.

Here I will discuss some of the most useful and powerful extensions that will give amazing capabilities to make your life easy when testing.

So, here’s a list of those amazing browser extensions for testers

HTML Validator:

This extension works based on the Tidy algorithm, It adds the HTML validator tab inside developer tools of chrome browser. The number of errors of an HTML page is seen with an icon in the browser status bar. The details are seen in the developer tools.

EditThisCookie:

As we know that modern applications use cookies and which will help increase the performance of the application, As cookies play such a vital role we should do test our site with those cookies and one of the ways to do so is Cookie corruption testing, EditThisCookie extensions act as a cookie Manager. We can add, delete. Edit, search, protect and block cookies of that site which is under test, we can do cookie corruption testing and can check the application behavior accordingly.

Web Developer:

Web Developer tool is "All In One Tool" this supports a wide variety of sub tools, which could help us to test applications in different ways, with this tool we can do cookie corruption testing, We can disable the CSS, Images, Clearing the cookies, resizing the browser to do Responsive testing, Disabling JavaScript many things we can do with this extraordinary extension.

Vysor:

Vysor is a simple and powerful tool for casting the mobile screen and this tool lets users view and control the mobile screen from our system. Vysor supports both iOS and Android mobiles. This is very helpful when we want to display our mobile screens to our teams virtually.

Selectors Hub:

Have you ever looked for a tool that could help you in writing effective xpaths? Selectors Hub is the best tool for the QA Automation engineers (SDETs), It supports all kinds of XPath, locators. This tool has become a companion for many QA automation engineers and helps to improve in writing the XPath. Many QA engineers call this tool "God Of Xpath", "Buddy of SDETs" etc... there are so many alternative names are there for this tool. I personally fell in love with the tool and I have improved my XPath writing skills. SelectorsHub is feature-packed and it is the most advanced tool to generate/write XPaths for the SVG/Shadow DOM/iframe elements. If you are looking for a tool that could help you in writing advanced xpaths then SelectorsHub is the only solution.

GoFullPage:

Many of us would have struggled to take the full web page screenshot. Even I do have faced difficulty many times when trying to send the reports of the test execution to my leads/clients where they keep on asking to share the complete view of the reports, This tool has really helped in taking the full view of any webpage and it also gives many options to save the captured image in different formats

Wappalyzer:

Let's assume that we have got a new project and on the very first meeting with the client we started explaining the technologies being used to build the application. doesn't that sounds cool? Yes with this extension we can find out what technologies are being used to build a particular application. This extension will show us what websites are built with.

BugMagnet:

We all know that Exploratory testing is the best way to find some of the hidden bugs in an application and also it helps us in understanding the application from our individual perspective, This is the Ultimate tool to perform exploratory testing with a predefined set of values. This tool acts as an assistant while doing exploratory testing.

BlazeMeter:

The ultimate tool to generate Selenium/Jmeter scripts in minutes, It gives functionality to record our actions on web applications and provides an option to import the generated script in various languages with different combinations. This tool really helps when we want to generate quickly a selenium script to do performance testing.

Ghostery:

We all know that in this internet world we are always been monitored. every visit, every action, and every click will get captured and is used to enhance the user experience. All these are done with trackers. Yes, trackers are the most powerful hidden insects which will track each and every user action and will display the ad's on the sites whatever we visit.

Ghostery is the best tool to keep yourself away from the trackers, This extension will block all the trackers being used in a site you visit.

Easy Auto Refresh:

As QA engineers, we work on many different applications, some of them needed to refresh frequently to update the content on the page. For such kinds of applications, we can use extensions that will auto-refresh the pages at a given interval of time. Auto-refresh plus is one of the best extensions to perform refresh action at a given interval of time. This extension has many features which could help us to do a refresh with a predefined set of conditions, We can perform Hard Refresh, Refresh Predefined Page, Refresh In Random Interval, etc...

Katalon Recorder:

Katalon is the perfect alternative for Selenium IDE, This would help automate the repetitive tasks without writing any code. This tool even supports Data-driven testing and with this, we can test the application repeatedly with a different set of data inputs. We can export the generated script in various languages which included - Java, Ruby, Python, Groovy, JS., and provides reports, logs, screenshots.

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I hope this article helps you to identify the right extension and I have personally used all the above-mentioned chrome extensions and all those literally helped me in enhancing my skills and saves a lot of time.

Note: I will try to identify and add more to this list and will keep updated If found any best alternatives for the above-mentioned extensions.

Please stay at home and maintain good hygiene. Do not step out without a mask and sanitiser.

Happy Learning!