A few years ago I decided to switch browsers from the open source Mozilla Firefox to Google’s ever popular Chrome. At first I was a little hesitant as I had begun to come accustom to the many extensions I had installed on Firefox. Though I was pleasantly surprised to find out the large quantity of extensions that exist on Chrome are in part, the same as Firefox.
Oddly enough, my current browser of choice is not the base Google Chrome package, but the Chromium based ‘
SRWare Iron’. This is exactly the same in look and feel as Chrome, but with increased privacy, as it can be quite jaw dropping to see what data Google can extract from your Chrome usage. I am also becoming strangely familiar with another Chromium based browser, called ‘
RockMelt’. This latest offering is billed as being the web’s only social browser, I find it extremely useful for viewing feed updates and posting on Facebook and Twitter. I also still use Firefox as my main development browser.
Anyway, now it’s time to get down to business! It can be difficult to sift through the Chrome web store, to find the useful extensions that are really worth installing and avoid the useless ones. So here are my Top 7 Recommended Google Chrome Extensions.
7. Clickable Links
Ever found it annoying when you receive an email or go on pretty much any site and find a link that isn't clickable and only shows the text? Well, Clickable Links solves this, I have almost come so accustom to this extension that when I switch to another computers' browser and I visit the same content, e.g. email, none of the links work.
6. 365Scores Notifier
This one might not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you have even just a slight interest in sport this extension is a must. It covers a vast number of sports from hockey to tennis and baseball to volleyball, though what I have mainly been using this extension for is the football scores.
It’s superb, I think at times it is even faster at reporting the live scores than the national broadcasters. The design is also extremely intuitive, you select the teams and leagues you want to follow, then what you know a little box appears notifying when for instance a team scores.
5. Ghostery
Ghostery is an extension that displays scripts that run on any website, which seek to track your activity, such as Google Analytics.
It will then provide a user-friendly list of the scripts running on the page, which can be blocked by the users’ preference.
It’s really handy to see who tracks what and can sometimes be quite eye opening to see the lengths sites will go to track your activity.
4. Mail Checker Plus for Google Mail
I’ll give you 3 guesses for what you think this extension does? No, your wrong! Hah, only kidding, I would imagine if you are astute enough you should be able to figure this one out.
The best part about this extension is the pop-up it does similar to 365Scores Notifier, whenever you get new mail and or when you load up your browser. It’s great as you don’t need to have a Gmail page open to check your mail for new messages.
The inbuilt options are fairly customisable and the pop-up includes the ability to mark the email as read, archive it, delete it or mark as spam as well as a short description. There maybe some privacy concerns with the setup as it does require you to pass your Gmail login information into the install, though I have never found any problems using this, it’s just something to bear in mind.
3. YTshowRating
Ever been disappointed when clicking on a related video on YouTube to find out that in fact its just 4 minutes of a static picture or it features the song ‘Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up’ or just simply it was not what you were expecting. Well, from now on you will never have this problem again, as the extension YTshowRating solves this.
It cleverly and somewhat mystically manages to get access to all the related videos and then post the related like or dislike bar underneath the video thumbnail. So you can now get an insight for what the video will be like, generally if it’s good the bar will be fully green or terrible, fully red.
2. WOT
WOT stands for ‘Web of Trust’, in effect, this extension is a website reputation ranking tool, where the basic user can use the crowd sourced data to gain an idea of the safety, trustworthiness, reliability and privacy in the shape of a circular icon.
It’s quite simple, once the extension is installed every link will have this icon next to it. The colour indication is fairly self explanatory if its green its good, orange is average, red is poor and opaque means there is no rating.
You can click on the icon to read the ratings in more depth as well as show the accuracy of the rating, with the more greyed people icons the more reliable the rating is. This is also the section where you can have your say, WOT encourages all users to provide ratings and add comments.
All in all its a fab extension, which relies on the trust of input from its user and I would say it pretty much hits the mark in terms of accuracy and reliability.
1. Adblock Plus
My first choice is a real no brainer, if you know anything about browser extensions, the chances are you will of heard of either AdBlock or Adblock Plus. Both have estimated downloads of over 100 million and since I used Adblock Plus on Firefox, when I switched to Chrome I stuck with the same. I am still yet to test ‘Adblock’ but I can’t image there is too much difference between them.
The way these extensions work is you subscribe to a general filter, which will recognise certain page elements, i.e adverts and prevent them from displaying. The ramifications of this similar to Ghostery is not only the safety aspect, but with fewer elements to load, pages will load faster.
The fact that I rank this at number one shows how highly I think of this extension and I think no one should browse the web without this.
In summary, browsers have come along way since the beginnings of the Web, with these utilities being in my opinion the foundation of a better web experience. Extensions are now more common place than ever and hopefully they are here to stay.
