It's been a little under 2 months since we launched JSON Hero and it's been received delightfully by the developer community. It's been visited by over 30k people who've created a total of 31k JSON documents. Our GitHub repo has reached 3.3k stars and we've even picked up a few new contributors.

One of the most requested features since launch has been to provide JSON Hero as a Chrome extension, to improve the experience of viewing a blob of JSON in the browser.

We're happy to announce that our Chrome extension is now available to install from the Chrome web store:

👉👉👉 JSON Hero Chrome extension

A different kind of JSON extension

Most of the popular JSON extensions available in Chrome work in a similar way: detect a pure JSON response and rewrite the document to prettify the JSON blob.

The JSON Hero extension takes a different approach: by default it will leave the JSON blob as-is, and only when clicking on the extension icon in the toolbar will it send the JSON to JSON Hero and open it in a new tab:

You can easily opt-in to automatically viewing JSON blobs with JSON Hero by visiting the extension settings and ticking the "auto-mode" checkbox on.

Warning This will cause any pure JSON responses to be sent to the jsonhero.io service, so please use this feature carefully. If you are running your own instance of JSON Hero, there is also the option of using a Custom Server URL.

More than just JSON

The JSON Hero Chrome extension goes beyond just viewing pure JSON blobs. For Firebase Firestore users, we've added a way to send the currently selected Firestore document to JSON Hero (reading complex documents in the Firestore console is a mess):

Browsing files in a GitHub repo and want to preview a JSON file in JSON Hero? We've got you covered:

We've even added a way to quickly view the Open Graph info of any website in JSON Hero:

More to come

Please install the Chrome extension today and let us know your thoughts and feature ideas on Twitter or over in our Discord. We'd especially be interested to hear of any more integration opportunities for the extension.

And as always, if you'd like to support us please ⭐️ us on GitHub. We've also open-sourced the Chrome extension code here.