19
votes
Most useful Chrome extensions
What are the most useful Chrome extensions that you have come across?
I use this extension called Workona, which has been just amazing at dealing with my obsession with having hundreds of tabs open.
I'll start with the obvious, available for Chrome and Firefox: uBlock Origin. Very light on resources, configurable block lists, speeds the loading of some pages up substantially and good for privacy.
If you're looking for more fine-grained control over what scripts you want to allow on websites, can't go wrong with uMatrix.
Firefox
Chrome
EDIT: Honestly, based on the recent topics that questioned the relevancy of "lists posts" and the fact that we have an unofficial wiki, someone should probably start creating a list of Tildes recommended browser extensions, with links to the comments that recommended them if possible. Or, I mean, I guess I could just do it... but that involves work. /EDIT
EDIT2: I started the wiki page, will work on actually building the list tomorrow.
EDIT3: After a slow day and two hours of work I got the list started. Next time someone makes a topic asking about browser extensions we can at least throw this at them as a reference and update it with new recommendations afterwards.
Hi, some of these addons are for Chrome only, but I use Firefox, so I have taken the time to extract the
.crxfiles or taken the source code and created.xpifiles so they can be installed in Firefox. If anyone would like a copy of these addons for Firefox let me know and I will link my.xpifiles to you as well as give you a step by step guide on how to do it yourself in case you don't trust taking random files from Internet strangers to put in your browser.Chrome extensions I have imported into Firefox:
Web Timer, this extension is pretty simple, it tracks your time spent on various domains. At one point the author sold the extension, but the buyer was using it to collect data, so he re-uploaded it. You can find the source code for the extension on GitHub. It's no longer developed but it still works fine, even in Firefox. I really want to fork the project and give it better styling, fix some bugs, and implement a feature for importing/exporting data, since your statistics are tied to localStorage and can be easily lost, but cannot be easily transferred across different browsers or devices.
Reddit Pro Tools, this is actually a somewhat controversial extension, but it allows the automatic tagging of users of certain subreddits based on their karma in those subreddits. It also can identify users who are new to Reddit, have negative karma in the subreddit you are currently visiting, or have negative karma overall. Like Web Timer, this addon is for Chrome only. The author initially released a Firefox version but took it down because of bugs, which is strange because since importing it to Firefox myself I have not noticed any issues. This extension is also not open source, or at least, the source code is not hosted anywhere. If you create a
.xpiyourself you will have the chance to review the source code after extracting it from the.crxfile.Other extensions I enjoy using:
Reddit Masstagger, this is another controversial extensions, largely because it is obviously political in nature, but it's still very useful for identifying "problem users" although it does so in a different way than Reddit Pro Tools and does not allow the addition of specific subreddits to its list.
Tildes Extended, made by Crius, this extension allows you to tag users among other things.
SnapLinks Plus, this is probably my favorite extension. It's quite simple, you hold the right mouse button, drag your cursor to draw a box, much like you would on your desktop, and any links inside that box are opened in a new tab. This makes opening multiple links at the same time incredibly easy and is one of the reasons I have 50+ tabs open most of the time. Funnily enough though, this extension doesn't work for Tildes under Firefox, but does in Chrome. In Firefox, it drags the page around as if you were grabbing hold of the web page. I haven't bothered to look into the issue because large lists of links are pretty rare on Tildes, but maybe someone else will take a look and if necessary, relay the info to Deimos, although I would be surprised if it were an issue with Tildes specifically, and not the extension/Firefox.
Iridium, this extension provides a lot of features for YouTube that other extensions do, but this one is open source. It allows volume adjustment through the scroll wheel, whether or not to automatically play videos, the reversal of the order of playlists, automatic video quality preferences, and a bunch of other stuff.
Dark Reader, this is one of those extensions that automatically converts a website to a darker theme, but this one does the best job out of all of them that I have tried so far, is open source, and doesn't add too much of a performance hit. It can be set to adjust sites on an opt-in or opt-out basis and has a few options for customization.
Midnight Lizard is like Dark Reader, it automatically converts websites to a dark theme. It too is open source and while I think the default preset and the performance hit is a bit worse, it has vastly many more options to customize pages than Dark Reader.
Luminous, this extension records all of the JavaScript events that a website is executing when you are visiting it and allows you to block those specific events, providing incredibly detailed control over code execution.
I've been looking for something like Snaplinks for a long time. I used an extension that would mass open links but it didn't do check boxes which was super annoying, this great, thank you.
No problem. Also, you have probably realized this already by looking at the extension's settings, but it took me a bit to figure it out so:
Normally the extension will select the link with the highest/largest font weight, but you can not only disable this permanently, but also temporarily bypass this feature.
So if you have a long list of things that you want to select at once, normally the extension would only select the "most bold" link, but holding
altwill select all of them, regardless of font weight. The modifier key that disables font weight selection sorting can also be reassigned ifaltisn't optimal for you.I read it but didn't pay too much attention to it and it probably would have bugged me, thanks.
What exactly does Tildes Extended do? The description on the github page is almost uselessly vague:
Edit: Never mind! The chrome extension page describes a few of its features.
I use a password manager (LastPass) and a couple of tools to help read and write (Google Dictionary and Grammarly).
As an IT Professional (lol) I took longer than i'd like to admit to finally get on board with a password manager, but man did it make a difference. A bit of pain to set up but really convenient once you do. I use 1Password myself.
A lot of the extensions I use frequently are pretty developer-focused, but some of them are more generally useful:
and finally, a bit of self-promotion: Tab Muter, which I posted about recently – it re-enables the "Mute Tab" feature that got removed relatively recently.
Treestyle tabs for Firefox
Aside from what's been mentioned, a few QOL things:
I've been using Hover Zoom instead of Imagus. I may have to give that one a try instead.
The Great Suspender, which suspends tabs that "time out" when you haven't focused on them for a configurable amount of time in order to save system resources that Chrome tends to hog. There are options to never suspend pinned tabs, tabs with unsaved form input, tabs playing audio, running on battery, etc.
As a lover of dark theming, Dark Reader is also vital to my every day browsing. A highly configurable extension to make most websites easy on my eyes out of the box.
I have to recommend DecentralEyes as well. It saves files from CDNs locally and serves them to websites, bypassing the CDN and halting monitoring from them.
Read Aloud for Chrome is pretty sweet. When I am at work I use it to read articles as audiobooks.
E: Oh also this plug is great because is can get through soft pay walls. You open a little window launching the plug-in and it shows article plain text. Pretty snazzy little work around that works on most papers.
I recently found out you can do the same thing in Firefox out of the box (as long as the site supports reader view).
Opening reader view there's an option to have the article read to you.
For me nothing is better than uBlock Origin
As for things that haven't already been mentioned. Most of these are fairly self explanatory.
As for ViolentMonkey scripts
These are for chrome (I use them with Vivaldi though). I left out security/adblock extensions from the list, because those are covered here many times already. (I mostly use uBlock Origin, Privacy Possum, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes)
For Chrome:
LastPass
Adguard (I have their desktop pro version too)
Privacy Badger
Stylus
Grammarly
Session Buddy
RES
Imagus
Remote Torrent Adder
Any reason you don't use ublock origin instead of adguard?
Well, I have the desktop version of Adguard (Pro) as well which integrates nicely with their browser extension. The desktop version lets you block ads in basically most other application.
Why limit to Chrome?
The Great Suspender - auto suspend tabs