CSS Diff

CSS Diff

As you make CSS changes in the DevTools inspector window this will track your changes and provide you with a nicely formatted diff

What is CSS Diff?
'CSS Diff' is a must-have Chrome extension for web developers. It tracks CSS changes, made in the DevTools Inspector, in real-time and provides a well-organized diff. This reduces the need for extensive back-and-forth between engineers and designers as it allows for specific, direct feedback on changes. This tool does not work with minified CSS, but works perfectly in a development environment with unminified sources.
Merlin
Stats
Users: 898 ▼ -5
Rating: 1.90 (10)
Version: 1.0 (Last updated: 2016-04-20)
Creation date: 2016-04-20
Risk impact: Low risk impact
Risk likelihood: Low risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Size: 20.60K
Stats date:

Chrome-Stats Rank

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Not available on Firefox
Not available on Edge
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Merlin
Summary

When you're working on a project turning a design that was done by someone else into HTML + CSS it can often be frustrating as you go back-and-forth with them trying to tweak things. Often times you'll end up getting marked up screenshots asking for things to be moved, changed, etc. Both the front-end engineer and the designer end up frustrated by all of this back-and-forth.

Once designers are introduced to the Chrome DevTools inspector where they can select elements and tweak CSS values till their heart's content the process can be massively improved because they can provide specific feedback on the values they want changed.

CSS Diff is an extension that eases this feedback cycle by allowing designers to simply send the engineer a common "diff" output of their changes so that those changes can be implemented. Typically you'll end up using something like less, scss, etc to manage your styles so you can just apply the diff directly to the sources, but groking the diff and manually making the updates is much better than trying to make updates based off of marked up screen shots.

This does not work on minified CSS because it is simply keeping a copy of the CSS from when the DevTools were opened and then showing live diff's against that. This typically isn't a problem as giving designers access to an development environment where the source code isn't minified should be trivial.

User reviews
This one works, but gotta install it by hand: https://github.com/kdzwinel/CSS-Diff

Doesn't work, just white screen
by Stepan Matskevich Stepan Matskevich, 2023-03-31

Does not work. Just shows white screen.
by Modern Chili Modern Chili, 2023-03-02
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Safety
Risk impact

CSS Diff is relatively safe to use as it requires very minimum permissions.

Risk likelihood

CSS Diff has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.

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Screenshots
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