Although nothing can replace real devices, these tools give you a good idea about how a page may look on different types of smaller devices. Testing for smaller screens is a must for a business website.
Some of the extensions mentioned below are available for other popular web browsers too. If you're using a different one, do search if the same testing tool is available for your browser or not.
Responsive Web Design Tester - This is one of the highly rated and popular Google Chrome extensions for testing responsive sites. It has several good features to help you test your designs with ease. The use of this extension is unobtrusive and you can surf the web in other tabs without any hindrance even if the testing activity is in progress. Your website must be on live web server to use this extension correctly. The extension itself is light and fast and doesn't affect the performance of the browser. Following are some of the unique features of this excellent RWD testing plugin.- Default modes - This extension includes standard tablet and mobile screen dimensions to quickly test your design in popular screen sizes.
- Custom screen size - Its handy custom screen size option lets the developers specify their own custom viewport dimensions to test different media queries.
- Resized popup - For every new screen dimension, the website is opened in a popup so that it can be tested and resized isolated from other tabs.
- Light and efficient - As I mentioned before, this extension is very light and doesn't affect the browser's performance in any way.
Resizer - This is yet another powerful Google Chrome extension to test and optimize responsive designs. Usage of this plugin is very easy and even a layman can utilize its features very easily. You can also use this unique extension in the form of bookmarklet for other web browsers. Its one of the smallest Google Chrome extensions that leave almost no footprint during actual usage. This plugin is open source and developers can extend or modify it to add new features. Following are some of the excellent features of this flexible design testing Chrome extension.- Preloaded screen dimensions - Like every RWD testing tool, this extension also comes preloaded with screen dimensions of all popular mobile and tablet formats.
- Reset or reload with a click - While testing a web page, you can quickly reset the screen size to default mode or can reload the page with a single click.
- Change dimensions intuitively - It has handy plus and minus buttons to change the custom screen dimensions on either side for rigorously testing media query breakpoints.
- Easy-to-use - And last but not the least, the usage of this plugin is very simple due to its obvious interface.
Responsive Inspector - Apart from regular RWD testing, this plugin also lets developers view media queries associated with any web page. This unique feature makes it very popular among web designers. It also has a sharing feature where you can post your responsive code on Behance service. It can also take screenshots of your responsive design that makes it an all-in-one solution for RWD testing. This extension is ideal for those designs, which have loads of media queries. Following are some of the powerful features of this handy design testing Chrome extension.- Take design screenshots - One can easily take screenshots of all resized rendered page with a click through this plugin.
- Inspect media query code - This powerful feature lets you read and analyze all the media queries present in a given web page.
- Share on Behance network - Web designers can also share their design screenshots on the popular Behance network.
- Switch to custom screen dimensions - And last but not the least, you can easily switch to different screen dimensions to thoroughly test your responsive design.
Window Resizer - It is one of the most frequently updated Google Chrome extensions that are quite popular among web designers. As the name suggests, this plugin lets you resize the browser window to specified dimensions for testing the responsive design. I liked its interface which is very user-friendly and lets you add custom viewport dimensions so easily. If you want to test your website within a large number of screen dimensions, then you must use this plugin. Following are some of the handy features supported by this awesome RWD testing extension for Chrome.- Intuitive interface - This plugin has one of the slickest interfaces among all the extensions that fall in its category.
- Easy custom dimension adding - The method of adding new custom screen dimensions is very easy through user friendly interface.
- Customizable shortcut keys - Developers can customize the shortcut keys associated with common tasks of this plugin to speed up the entire testing process.
- Import or export settings - This flexible feature lets you import or export all the settings associated with this plugin so that you can use the same plugin data on a different computer.
Mobile/RWD Tester - This is the last extension included in our list of best RWD testing Google Chrome extensions. Though this extension is not small in size comparatively, its footprint on the system is surprisingly very small. I've used this plugin in one of my projects and found it very useful and intuitive. It has a long list of popular device screen dimensions against which you can easily test your responsive design. The plugin itself is blazing fast and works seamlessly without any kind of problem. Following are some of the powerful and handy features of this plugin.- Test multiple devices in one go - This is perhaps the only Google Chrome extension that lets you test the responsive design in multiple device screens at a given time. This speeds up the entire testing process.
- Large device list - Its device database is large and is continuously growing to support more mobile device screen sizes.
- Total control over screen size - Developers have complete control over the viewport size which can be easily changed during the testing process.
- Light and fast - This extension is very fast and works fine even with complex responsive designs.