Chrome, Edge, Brave
Any Chromium browser
- Unzip it anywhere you'll keep it — deleting the folder uninstalls the extension.
- Open
chrome://extensions. - Turn on Developer mode, top right.
- Click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder.
Firefox
Signed by Mozilla — installs for good
- Click the button — Firefox asks whether to add it.
- Choose Add, then Okay.
- That is the whole install; it survives a restart.
- Prefer to read it first? The ZIP loads unpacked from
about:debugging.
Neither store carries the extension yet. The Firefox build is signed by Mozilla, so it installs and updates like any other add-on. Chromium browsers have no equivalent — they only accept an extension from the Chrome Web Store or an unpacked folder, so keep that folder somewhere permanent: deleting it uninstalls the extension.
Pick this colour — right-click anything
Reads the actual pixel you clicked, so it works on images, gradients, canvas and video, not just elements that have a CSS colour. Opens Color Tools with it loaded.
Open this element in CSS Wireframe
Captures only what you right-clicked — even inside an iframe — as a sanitized subtree, without its ancestors or siblings. The toolbar button does the same for the whole page.
Send a selection to a tool
Highlighted text routes to whichever tool fits — JSON Formatter, Hash Generator, Encoder / Decoder, Diff Checker, Regex Tester, Case Converter and the rest.
Smart Open with HelpyTools — right-click a link
Fetches the target once without cookies, classifies it from MIME type, filename and content, then opens JSON, Markdown, SVG, JS/CSS, Image Converter or HTTP Analyser. Errors and unknown formats open as the real response, so status and headers aren't discarded.
Convert an image — right-click it
Sends the image straight to Image Converter.
Extract this page's colour palette
On the toolbar button's right-click menu. Pulls the page's palette into Color Tools.
Send, in the HTTP Analyser
The analyser reads any raw HTTP message, curl command or .har file on its own. What a page cannot do is make a cross-origin request and read the response — CORS sits below anything page script reaches. The extension runs it from its background worker instead, and a Send button appears.
The bridge runs only on helpytools.com
The piece that talks to the tool pages is injected nowhere else — plus a localhost origin for development.
One script loads everywhere: the pointer tracker
About seventy lines. Pixel picking and element capture need to know where you right-clicked, and a context-menu click carries no coordinates. It listens for contextmenu and nothing else — no mouse tracking, no scroll listening, no reading the page on load. It remembers one point.
Captures strip content
Wireframe capture removes text, comments, scripts, embedded documents, form names and values, event handlers and data attributes, keeping structural names, IDs, classes and a small attribute allowlist.
Nothing is uploaded
Every handoff goes to a HelpyTools tab on your machine, where the tool runs in your browser as it always does. There is no server in the path and no telemetry.