My Top Chrome Extensions
Below I present some very useful extensions I use while using Google Chrome, in no particular order.
- Blocks ads just like Firefox extension and makes the web less junky to look at. You can whitelist good ads, and an argument could be had your harming websites revenue stream, but a lot of nasty tricks such as spyware, malware have used ads as a vector to spread. Not least the dishonesty some sites use in splitting up articles in to 10 pages to pump ad revenue.
- If you don’t know what https or ssl means don’t worry. All it is encrypted webpages which protect your information between you and that website. Commonly used in banking online, it is now spreading to sites like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the like as a more secure way to protect your information. This extension turns it on without you even noticing!
- not that nice flavour of ice-cream! - A Cookie Whitelist Manager that helps protect your privacy. Automatically removes unwanted cookies.What are cookies? Little text files that website use to remember who you are. It’s okay if you have an account and log in, but the trouble arises when nefarious people use it to track which sites you visit.
- A bookmark scanner that checks for duplicate and bad links. I imported 100’s of bookmarks from firefox collected over about 4/5 years at least. Websites change, move content, you can accidentally bookmark a website twice. This helps get your bookmarks working for you and being useful again!
- sends links from your browser to your phone or tablet - be it Android, Nokia, or Apple iOS device. You bookmark a page on your mobile device and install this nifty extension in Chrome, when you click the button, next time you open that page on your mobile deivce, it will open it automatically.
- does what it says on the tin, but can take a screenshot of the whole page of a website, no nasty scrolling and trying to stitch to halves of a screenshot together, works like magic!
- protects your web searches from prying eyes. Can use an option in Chrome or be set as the main search engine.
About:Flags (Chrome Beta only for now
Most people won’t know about Chrome’s about:flags (open a new tab, enter
about:flags, hit enter), similiar to Firefox’s about:config and possibly
just as dangerous, it presents “under the hood” options normal users
wouldn’t need to touch. Some of them are very cool to use and will no
doubt cement Chrome’s market share gains. Here’s my favourites:
Tab Overview: Enables Expose like Mac OS X interfaces for swapping between tabs, very cool1
Disable outdated plug-ins: Disables plugins if Chrome knows about security problems with your old version of the plugin. Not only that but offers to update.
XSS Auditor: Adds protection from Webkit to prevent sites trying to steal information you have on the other (crazy non-real-world example would be Yahoo! trying to get Google login info) Replace Google with any site and Yahoo! with a nefarious one.
Instant: Like Google instant web search like I do? You’ll love this that loads webpages as you type. Example is www.google.com, then erase com and put in ie and you never had to press enter once to visit Google.ie, like magic!