21 Jan
The best Google Chrome extensions can make your experience with the most popular web browser even better. After all, Chrome already offers swift performance, a clean interface and easy syncing with mobile devices. But good extensions can offer even more.
So which extensions should be part of your Chrome experience? To help sort through all your choices, we’ve picked the best Chrome extensions that you should try out right now. You know, extensions that can help the best Chromebooks be even better.
Best chrome extensions for work
A. Great utilities
1. OneTab
If your browser looks like a train wreck with so many tabs open that you can no longer tell which is which, you need OneTab, and you need it now. This brilliant extension converts your tab-overload into a neat list, allowing you to restore them at any point. A great time management tool, it puts an end to tab-hoarding while making sure nothing is lost. You’ll be amazed how beautiful your browser looks when it’s not crowded with unreadable tab titles.
Privacy assurance
Information about your tabs are never transmitted or disclosed to the OneTab developers. The only exception to this is if you intentionally click on our ‘share as a web page’ feature that allows you to upload your list of tabs into a web page in order to share them with others. Tabs are never shared unless you specifically use the ‘share as a web page’ button.
Additional Benefits
Depending on how many scripts are running inside your tabs, moving them to OneTab can also speed up your computer by reducing the CPU load. We have also had reports that this also contributes to your computer resuming from sleep more quickly.
2. LastPass
The days when people used the same silly password for every single login are thankfully over. But how do you handle all those unique and complicated passwords? LastPass is your security protection extension. It saves all of your passwords in one place, auto-filling the login fields whenever you access recognized websites. It also generates random passwords that no one will be able to guess, and it keeps your logins safe and sound.
Moreover, LastPass puts you in control of your online life – making it easy to keep your critical information safe and secure so you can access it whenever you want, wherever you are. Save all your passwords, addresses, credit cards and more in your secure vault and LastPass will automatically fill in your information when you need it.
All your data, where you need it:
- Store usernames and passwords and LastPass will log you in automatically
- Fill forms quickly by saving your addresses, credit card numbers and more
- Save passports, insurance cards and anything else you want to keep safe
- All your data is available on any device for free
- Anything you save on one device is instantly synced on all your other devices
Protect yourself from breaches:
- LastPass Security Dashboard provides and overview of your weak and reused passwords and how to improve them
- LastPass dark web monitoring alerts you if your information is at risk
- Generate secure passwords to replace weak ones
- Protect your LastPass account with multifactor authentication
Simplify your life:
- Never forget another password
- Passwords are auto filled for you as you go to your sites – less typing!
- Securely share your passwords with friends and family
- Only worry about one master password
Only you know your master password, and only you can access your vault. Your master password is never shared with LastPass.
Your browser is like your apartment. It needs the occasional sweeping and cleaning. With Click and Clean, all of the annoying tasks involved in browser data cleaning become faster, easier and more effective. This isn’t just a matter of tidying up info that your browser stores like your cache, saved passwords and previous searchers. It has important implications for functionality and for security. The Click and Clean extension is specifically designed to both help boost your browser’s functionality and speed, and to protect it from online troublemakers.
Click&Clean is an innovative and totally free solution for your PC, Mac or Chromebook, that will help you to:
- Scan your PC for Malware
- Delete your browsing history
- Remove download history
- Erase temporary files
- Clear cookies
- Empty cache
- Delete client-side Web SQL Databases
- Remove Flash Cookies (LSOs)
- Protect your privacy by cleaning up all traces of your internet activity
- Clean up your hard drives and free up more disk space.
4. SurfEasy VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows users to access a private network no matter where they are located or the network they are physically connected to. It’s a terrific solution for remote access (say, if you are working away from your employer’s Intranet connection), for using local browsing of various locations (for instance, if you are surfing in the UK but want to access the web as if you were in the US), and for protecting your Internet browsing with smart encryption. SurfEasy provides all these and other services directly from your browser.
Bookmarks are a genius invention, but accessing them can be really frustrating – so many clicks through so many sub-menus to get to the address you’re looking for. This is exactly what the Bookmarks Sidebar extension is here to fix. One little click to the left of your screen, and your full bookmarks list is right there. With robust customization options, you can also organize and manage your lists at your own convenience. This is a great time management tip that helps you keep track of your most important pages.
This extension allows you to access your bookmarks by clicking on the left side of your screen. You can edit, delete or rearrange your bookmarks by drag & drop and view some information about them by just clicking them with your left mouse key. You can check your bookmarks for updated or broken urls, too. If you found a bug, have ideas for features or improvements, please let me know.
B. Chrome extensions for bloggers
Every blogger needs an assistant, but most bloggers can’t afford one. Luckily, Evernote Web Clipper is a great substitute. Instead of saving bookmarked links, the Web Clipper saves the content of the page that is relevant for you. It lets you clip it and copy it to your Evernote board, allowing you to add comments, tags and highlights. These clippings are extremely helpful when you’re preparing and researching your next post, and you can also use them as visuals.
Evernote Web Clipper is a browser extension that lets you save interesting things you find on the web directly to your Evernote account.
- Web Clipper – Capture ideas and inspiration from anywhere with ease. Save articles, web pages, and screenshots directly to Evernote.
- Save what matters – Clip web pages, articles, or PDFs and save them in Evernote. Screen capture full pages or just the parts you want—without distracting ads and sidebars.
- Customize your clips – Take a screenshot of a web page, then add highlights, text, and other annotations. With Web Clipper, you can make sure what’s important is clear at a glance.
- Keep content organized – Tag what you save so your research, photos, ideas, and more are all easy to find using keywords. You can also add titles and save content to the notebook that makes sense.
- Go beyond bookmarks – Save web page URLs, images, and descriptions to your relevant Evernote notebook and keep all your related content in one easy-to-find place.
2. Grammarly
Even the most experienced bloggers encounter grammar glitches here and there. While that’s only human, it’s not ideal for your online publication and can even hurt your professional image as an authority in your field. By adding the Grammarly extension to your browser, you basically invite an editor to go over your texts and make sure they are error-free. The only difference is that the extension won’t judge you afterwards.
- High-quality writing – A spelling checker can catch typos. A grammar checker can catch grammatical mistakes. But good writing is more than just proper grammar and spelling. Grammarly helps you fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues, and it can also help you revise sentences that are grammatically correct but wordy and unclear.
- Works where you do – Grammarly for Chrome is compatible with the text fields on most websites, including Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, and millions of others. Once you add Grammarly to Chrome, you’ll start seeing writing suggestions as you type.
- Trusted by millions of users – Business professionals, students, writers, bloggers, and plenty of people who just want to write better trust Grammarly to help them produce their best work.
- Grammarly Premium – Grammarly Premium offers comprehensive feedback, designed to help you meet the highest standards. Its suggestions elevate the quality of your writing through full-sentence rewrites to improve your clarity, word choice enhancements, tone adjustments, and more. Grammarly Premium works where you do to help you make the best impression with your writing.
- Detects your tone – Grammarly’s built-in tone detector helps you figure out how your message will come across to readers. That means you’ll have the opportunity to add a little more confidence, friendliness, or whatever the situation calls for before you hit send.
- Multilingual speakers – Grammarly helps multilingual speakers sound their best in English with tailored suggestions to improve grammar and idiomatic phrasing. In addition to offering general fluency assistance, Grammarly can offer tailored suggestions for writing issues common among Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, French, and German speakers. Tailored suggestions for other language backgrounds are on the way.
3. ImTranslator
Don’t let language barriers stand between your blog and the content of the World Wide Web. Expand your sources of information to include texts in any foreign language. With ImTranslator you can receive quality translations of full web pages, relevant paragraphs or single words.
What’s that word you’re looking for? It kind of has the same meaning as that other word, but also extends to other stuff, right? Thesaurus – Bloggers wouldn’t survive without it. While there are many great thesaurus services available online, they require you to visit their website, load words and navigate between different options. As an extension, Power Thesaurus is available to you directly from the tab you’re currently working on, and this will save you loads of precious writing time.
Do more with handy tools
1. Toolbar button – search for synonyms, antonyms, definitions, example sentences and other results. Quick copy on click.
2. Shortcut in context menu (select a word and right-click) – open PowerThesaurus.org
3. Synonyms on term selection – simply select any word on any page and Voila! You have great synonyms with a definition right there! In case of editable field when you write – get the list of synonyms and use them.
Get extra results in Chrome toolbar
- Synonyms and Antonyms
- Definitions and Sentences
- Related terms, Narrower and Broader terms
- Similar terms, terms with similar pronunciation
- Rhymes
Use Keyboard shortcuts
- Results for selected term
- Navigate results
- Use/Copy result
5. StayFocused
StayFocused extension, is the one which will forcefully shut you off of all the time-wasting websites that keep you from fulfilling your goals. You can decide for yourself which websites are blocked and for how long, whether you’re allowed short Facebook breaks or whether you are going all in. The goal is to get work done, and StayFocused will be there to keep you on track.
It’s highly configurable, allowing you to block or allow entire sites, specific subdomains, specific paths, specific pages, even specific in-page content (videos, games, images, forms, etc).
C. Chrome extensions for designers
1. Loom
Loom is a tool that designers in the online video age would absolutely love. This extension simplifies video screen recording for many purposes – webinars, how-tos, reviews and more. Designers can use it both to present their own work to clients, as well as for creating videos for their clients’ online presence. Loom doesn’t just capture clips. It offers post-production editing options, and generous storage so that you can manage a library of your videos.
Regular people use google to search for words. Designers search for images. Whenever you need to trace the appearances of an image or find its original creator, Google Search by Image will canvas the Web and show you all available results. This is a tremendously helpful tool for making sure you’re on the right side of copyright laws. You can also use it to discover artists and expand your sources for visual inspiration.
3. Color Zilla
The ideal color reader tool, Color Zilla, lets you discover all info of the shades and tones directly from your browser. It’s a super convenient tool for designers to quickly and accurately analyze colors of individual pixels. Once you have the required info, you can copy it to another software and immediately integrate it into your designs. Color Zilla also offers advanced tools, like a gradient generator and a color palette analysis for full web pages.
4. HoverZoom
In design, more than in any other field, the devil is in the details. A close look is needed to make important decisions when you work. But when you browse through tons of images, clicking on each and every one of them to increase their size can be extremely time consuming. That’s where HoverZoom comes in, giving you an expanded version of thumbnails and previews with a simple mouse hover. You get a pop-up version of the image that is true to the original size and quality without loading new pages all the time.
5. WhatFont
Similar to Color Zilla, this extension also implements smart reading functions, only it does so to analyze font. It works with a simple mouse hover over any text you see online. WhatFont will immediately display the font type, its family and its full properties, including size, style and even color. Add this neat extension to your browser and you will never need to play “guess the font” game ever again.
D. Chrome extensions for small biz owners
1. SEO Quake
Do you want to see an increase in your website’s traffic? The answer is in SEO. SEO Quake will help you get to your search engine goals by analyzing your website’s content and metadata. This awesome extension will generate detailed reports for individual pages in your website, reviewing both basic metrics (title, description) and advanced ones (keyword density, link-building).
If you’re not already familiar with Hootsuite, it is one of the leading social marketing tools available today. The Hootsuite Hootlet extension is basically a browser-based shortcut for many of the great features that are offered by the full Hootsuite dashboard. This includes searching for relevant keywords throughout various social networks, posting content to multiple social channels directly through the browser widget and scheduling social posts based on neat content that you find online.
Emailing is a huge part of any small biz owner’s workday. It can be distracting when you try to focus on specific tasks and still need to constantly check your inbox and be reminded of important emails to send out. The Right Inbox (Gmail based) offers a fantastic solution for streamlining the email process while allowing you to continue to multitask. It lets you schedule emails you compose on the spot but want to send out later, creating recurring emails to avoid the repetitive action, and to send yourself reminders and notes to arrive at specific time points.
4. Bitly
Long, incomprehensible URLs are a nightmare. They are both aesthetically off-putting (who wants a never ending line of weird characters on their business card?) and completely impractical. Bitly, a wonderful URL shortening tool, is a lifesaver in this regard. It takes long web addresses and shortens them into something easier to share. Bitly’s browser extension saves you the trouble of going over to their homepage each time you need to shorten a link. Simply use the extension and it will generate a shortened version right on the spot.
5. List Goal
Email marketing is one of the most effective methods of keeping your audience engaged and expanding your clientele. But in order for your email campaigns to work, you need actual subscribers. List Goal is an extension that helps you prioritize your subscribers list by setting growth goals and keeping track of the path to reach them. With a smart dashboard, it monitors your various emails’ performance and detects both the progress and the obstacles you’re facing.
E. Chrome extensions for freelancers
1. FoxClocks
Preparing for a video call with potential clients in Japan? Working on a deadline set for the time zone in Brazil? Freelance life is a transnational experience. While the world is getting more and more connected, time differences are still very real and they are hard to keep track of. FoxClocks is a foxy extension that helps you keep not one, but multiple time zones. You can choose to display clocks permanently on your status bar, or reveal them with just one click.
Dozens of millions of people all over the world are using Google Calendar as their main calendar. It’s a fantastic tool that needs no introduction. But did you know that you can simplify the Calendar viewing with this browser extension? Instead of reaching for your phone to open the Calendar app, or clicking through various links in your Gmail inbox, this extension gives you a neat little button that reveals your daily affairs with a simple click, right where you are.
3. Sticky Notes
An effective note-taking system is one of the key items in the freelancer’s survival kit. Sticky Notes has taken note-taking to the next level. Clicking the extension button from your browser reveals the various notes you wrote for yourself and you can edit the text. You can control the size of the note popping up, as well as customize fonts, text size and colors. It’s like having a magic sticky note stuck to your computer screen that you can make visible and invisible whenever you want!
Don’t get bogged down by complicated invoicing procedures for your projects. Use Invoice Quick, a browser-based invoicing tool, to generate and track invoices for your clients. The Chrome extension offers a dashboard for creating detailed invoices and emails them to your clients. You can then integrate your PayPal account to receive your money directly through the invoice. The documents are designed for professional use, with a sleek look and intuitive layout. You can even add your own logo too!
Video demonstrations are an excellent method for communicating information, often used by freelancers to present progress to clients or when creating instructional videos. To prepare great video demos, we recommend you check out the Screen and Webcam Recorder extension. It has a simple interface that provides you with all the features you need to create excellent, high-quality videos. With unlimited storage, you can record as many videos as you want, with no expiration date – all stored and available for future use.
Conclusion
Just be aware that extensions can slow down your browser, so make sure you stick to what you think will be most useful. Some extensions can be ethically dubious or even malicious, but Chrome features new restrictions on extension developers that should help mitigate that problem.