The Best Free Google Chrome Extensions
When we first did a version of this story in January 2015, Chrome had about 22.65 percent of the browser market worldwide, according to Net Applications. Today it’s at 68.6 percent, and rival browsers can’t even crack 10 percent.
Chrome has gained, but it has lost some love—from us. After several years as PCMag’s favorite browser, a resurgent Firefox took our Editors’ Choice award. That said, there is no denying Chrome’s popularity. Plus, like Firefox, it supports extensions that make it even better. Its library of extras, found at the Chrome Web Store, has rivaled Firefox’s for years, and provides quick access to just about every web-based app imaginable.
Recognizing how popular Chrome is, Microsoft rebuilt its Edge browser as a Chromium version so it now supports all Chrome extensions natively while still supporting its own Edge extensions from the Microsoft Store. (For more, read Tips and Tricks Inside Microsoft’s Edge Browser.)
Rather than have you stumble blindly through the Chrome Web Store to find the best extensions, we’ve compiled a list of several dozen you should consider. Some are unique to Google and its services (such as Gmail), but most extensions work across operating systems, so you can try them on any desktop platform (especially on Chromebooks); there may be some versions that work on the mobile Chrome, too.
All of these extensions are free, so there’s no harm in giving them a try. You can easily disable or remove them by typing chrome://extensions/ into the Chrome address bar, or right-clicking an extension’s icon in the toolbar to remove it. Every extension must have a toolbar icon; you can hide them without uninstalling the extension by right-clicking and selecting Hide in Chrome Menu. You can’t get rid of the icons forever without uninstalling. Read on for our favorites, and let us know if we missed a great one.
Screen/Page Capture
Don’t limit yourself to basic screenshots. Make them awesome by annotating them with shapes, arrows, and text comments. One click uploads an image to AwesomeScreenshot.com for storage on Google Drive and sharing quickly to social media.Full Page Screen Capture
Lots of webpages scroll on and on, and if you need to capture what the whole thing looks like, it may seem impossible. Full Page Screen Capture will do it, scrolling through the page for you and capturing a JPG. Just don’t use your mouse while it auto-scrolls the page.
Diigo Web Collector
Diigo is a nice mix of social bookmarking and a full info grabber like Evernote. This extension puts the service to work, letting you bookmark, archive, and annotate everything you see online. You get 500 bookmarks for free, but Diigo will charge you $40/year to ditch advertising and add unlimited image storage and webpage backup.
tons, or apps. One click “Pockets” the content so you can access it anytime—even offline—on all your devices. There are Pocket apps and add-on for everything, and content isn’t limited to text; you can store video, too. Need to make a video out of what’s in a tab? Screencastify will do it without needing any other external software. And it works beyond the confines of the browser tab, recording the whole screen if you want, including your webcam thumbnail. Animation tools like highlighting a mouse in a spotlight help with visibility. Videos are easily saved to YouTube or Google Drive. The free version allows videos up to 10 minutes long.
Send to Kindle for Google Chrome
Lots of people prefer to read on their Kindle devices or apps. If you find a webpage with a longform article on it, use Amazon’s extension. It will reformat pages and send them directly to your Kindle device or app of choice for reading later. You can even get a preview before you send it. (If you have another ebook reader that uses ePub format, try dotEPUB.)Google Services
Ever wanted to check your email but didn’t feel like expending the extra energy to open a new tab? No judgments, we’ve been there, too. The best extension for users of multiple Gmail accounts—I’ve got three!—is Checker Plus. It gives you fast access via a drop-down menu in Chrome, desktop notifications, color coding, even voice input for writing messages. It also reads your mail to you—all without actually visiting Gmail. It’s free, but a donation of any amount unlocks even more features. This is a must-have for any Gmail junkie.Checker Plus for Google Calendar
Never open Google Calendar again. This extension gives you full access to everything you like about Google Calendar from your Chrome toolbar, plus multiple methods of adding calendar events, such as right-clicking on a webpage to add it like an appointment. The notifications (including voice) are perfectly done. It runs in the background when Chrome is closed, so you never miss an engagement. Google Scholar is a search engine from Google that is limited to scholarly articles and case law. This extension puts it into a drop-down menu on Chrome. It also makes it easy to transfer your web search into a scholar search. It works best if you’re on your campus network, but can be configured to work anywhere, as long as your school library gives you credentials. Load it up, double-click any word on any webpage, and you’ll see a pop-up with the definition. Or search for words from the toolbar. Multiple languages are supported. Ever visit a foreign website and wish you could read it? For certain languages, Chrome will automatically offer to translate the whole page to the language of your choice. With the extension, you can highlight a word or line of text and translate only that, rather than the whole page.Google Voice (By Google)
Google’s voicemail-plus-call-around-number service is still useful, and can be plugged right into your browser. This extension offers on-the-fly access to your voicemail messages (with transcriptions) and SMS texts (to which you can reply), plus you can initiate VoIP calls right in the browser. It makes every phone number you see on a website clickable for calling (either explicitly or via a right-click menu).
Interface/Utilities
AdBlocker Ultimate
You’ve probably heard of Adblock Plus (a community-driven extension ported from Firefox) and the unrelated AdBlock. But the better pick is AdBlocker Ultimate, which doesn’t play games (like allowing certain “allowed” ads to go through to appease sponsors). It’s open source and also available on Edge, Safari, and Opera.
Hover Zoom+
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/a>There are a lot of thumbnail images on sites like Google Images, Instagram, deviantART, and social networks. This extension shows you the full-size image when you hover your mouse over any tiny thumbnail, assuming there is a larger image available. This is an open-source version of the original HoverZoom (RIP).
Noisli
Need some ambient background noises to help you stay focused? Noisli in Chrome provides a drop-down menu full of them to play, with a sleep timer to turn the sound off. You can also use it from the web or get the apps for iOS or Android. The free version is limited to 16 sounds and only streams up to 15 hours per day.
Productivity
Auto Text Expander
Don’t type so much. This add-on lets you write little snippets that expand into full, frequently used text, from one word up to full paragraphs. Never type that annoying email out again—just write it once and then type “@jerks” whenever you want to use it (for an example that can’t possibly come from my real life).
Forest
The Pomodoro technique is meant to make you work 25 minutes, break for five, then start it all again to increase productivity. There are many timers out there to help, but Forest is unique. As it counts down, it grows an animated tree as long as you refrain from visiting sites you’ve blocked (ahem, Facebook, cough). By the end of the day, you could have a whole forest. There are also mobile apps to keep you focused.
Lookup Companion for Wikipedia
Wikipedia may be second only to Google for searches throughout the day (at least on my computer). Lookup Companion gives you toolbar access to search the user-built encyclopedia of everything. Results appear in a drop-down menu and open in a new Chrome tab. (To search with a right-click, try Right-Click Search Wikipedia.)MightyText
You’re at your PC. Your Android phone is in your pocket. You get a text. Don’t waste time fishing it out. MightyText shows your texts in Chrome (or Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE). All the messages sent and received, even with pictures and video, are synced, as long as you have an Android pho
ne with the MightyText app installed. You’ll also get low-battery alerts. There’s an extension specifically to get MightyText messages in Facebook or Gmail, too.
Office
Yes, that’s Microsoft Office, now allowing you to create documents in the Chrome browser right from the toolbar, which you can then edit and save at Office.com. It works for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Sway Online, all without having the full office suite software installed at all.
Pushbullet
Notifications are all important for mobile and desktop users these days, but they’re seldom in sync. Pushbullet changes that with this extension that matches up what you get on the Pushbullet apps and extensions. You’ll see calls come in, even on your desktop, be able to forward files from PC to smartphone, and send SMS texts from your desktop (if you have an Android phone). There’s also an extension for Firefox, and Pushbullet has an IFTTT channel, making it almost infinitely extensible.
SimilarWeb
Ever wonder what the traffic is like for a site you’re visiting? SimilarWeb will instantly provide a snapshot of “engagement statistics” for the site you’re visiting.
WikiWand
Wikipedia’s presentation is a lot of things—dense, interesting, and busy—but few would refer to it as pretty. Wikiwand makes it so. It optimizes all Wikipedia content with its own interface, and ensures that whenever you click a link for Wikipedia, you see Wikiwand’s much-improved look instead. Customize it so the fonts and images come in just the way you like. You can also get Wikiwand for Firefox.
Security
Abine Blur is a favorite service of PCMag, and this Chrome extension puts all of Blur’s great privacy options right in the browser. It creates and stores strong passwords, blocks trackers, masks emails, and more, most of it for free. (The full version will cost you $39 per year.) Enter a hot zone of privacy and security with this add-on. The drop-down menu from Click&Clean provides access to your browser cache, cookies, plug-ins, extensions, and history—and quick ways to erase them. You even get a full browser test to see how well Chrome is protecting you. It will help you scan for malware using Bitdefender, clear your private data, and a host of other security options you’re neglecting. Customize all the options to get full coverage with Click&Clean.There’s one goal with this extension: block all third-party cookies from social media and advertisers that follow you as you browse. Disconnect claims this helps browsing speed and even saves on battery life for mobile devices. You can see the cookies you’re blocking in case you want to let some through.
DuckDuckGois the search engine that doesn’t track you. It extends that philosophy to this extension, which wants nothing more than to keep your privacy going all the time. It provides a guide of sites you can trust (look for the instant privacy grade in the toolbar), forces encryption when available, blocks trackers, and of course makes it easy to search—privately—because it makes DDG your default search engine. Yeah, you can use this to go directly in and change the text in a cookie. But it can also delete or add a cookie or create a new one from scratch. Take total cookie control.
Ghostery
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes as you surf the web. Bugs, beacons, pixels, and more are used to track what you’re doing. Ghostery is there to tell you what’s happening in the background and give you control over these “extras.” If you don’t like a company or what it’s doing, Ghostery can block scripts, objects, even whole images so you can retain your privacy. It’s on almost every browser and also via apps on Android, iOS, and Amazon.
HTTPS Everywhere
Visiting sites with “https://” in front of the URL (look for the green “lock” icon and the word “Secure” in Chrome’s Omnibox for another indicator) means you’re vising a site using SSL encryption—a must for e-commerce at the very least and preferred everywhere. This extension ensures every site you visit that has “https://” as an option uses it, providing another layer of security.
WOT – Website Reputation Ratings
The Web of Trust is an online community that rates websites based on one major criterion: can it be trusted? The WOT extension is the first line of defense against sites with a bad reputation, showing red, yellow, and green icons next to search results, providing you a heads-up notice before you click a link.Amazon has retired some of its other Chrome extensions in favor of letting Assistant do the work. You can use it to add things to your Amazon Wish List (from any site), do on-the-fly Amazon searches, allow price comparisons when you shop other sites, check shipments, and more. Of course it’s also helping Amazon track where you’re shopping, so you may only want to embrace it (like so many other extensions) if you really, really appreciate what it delivers. The Camelizer displays the full price history for an item on Amazon, with some comparison to third-party sales. It won’t tell you when savings are on the way, but it can help you decide when the cost is most likely to drop. Do you trust reviews for products online? You probably shouldn’t since 39 percent of them are totally unreliable. Another option is to use Guardian by Fakespot to analyze the reviews on the product you’re interested in.
Honey
Honey (owned by PayPal) not only automatically sees what shopping site you’re on, and provides a drop-down list of applicable coupons (or links right on the site to get better deals); it will automatically apply all the coupons it can to your checkout service on select sites, so you’re not cutting/pasting/typing obscure, long codes. (Honey saves you money, sure, but “free” is in the eye of the beholder, because, of course, it is collecting data. And Amazon hates it enough to tell you it’s malware.)
eturned products to save money? You can do that on Amazon but it’s a pain to find them. Or it was before Saleboat came along to display them right on the Amazon page along with the new products.
Offers
Offers.com—a sister site to PCMag under our parent company, Ziff Davis—offers up coupons and promo codes galore to save on name-brand stuff all over the web, at over 10,000 partner stores. Best of all, Offers tests all the codes it gets first, so you don’t have to waste time trying expired coupons.
Social/Sharing
Got a few websites you want to spend less time visiting? Stanford.edu’s HabitLab will try to retrain you into doing so, by using different kinds of interventions when you go to the site. For example, go to Facebook too much and it may hide your News Feed. Whatever works best to keep you away will be used the most, until you’re barely visiting those sites at all. Ain’t no party like a Netflix Party! Rather than chill, this extension lets you start a Netflix movie or show, then create an online party with any remote friends also running the extension, so you can all watch together from different locations. Instagram addicts know how great the app is. This extension brings that same degree of photo-heavy Instagram-atical excellence to the desktop browser experience. You access Instagram right from the toolbar and never miss another like or comment.Pablo
Perfect your social media artistry with Pablo—it sizes graphics you find online or from your drive, so they’re always a perfect fit on sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It even comes with photos courtesy of the Unsplash free stock photo site.
Tabs
Another new tab interface, DashOne fills the page with interactive widgets and bookmarks to get your new tab started.
The best way to set up a home/start page in Chrome is to use Infinity and customize with launch buttons for all your sites and web-based apps, as well as quick access to search, weather, bookmarks, and history in the browser. Set the wallpaper to rotate so you never have the same page twice. One of many wranglers of tabs, this one helps you by deleting the tabs you haven’t looked at in a while—but it makes them easy to get back. Favorite sites don’t get closed. Chrome can sync the tabs between computers using the same Google account. Lots of tabs can be a problem; xTab prevents you from opening up too many tabs by setting a tab limit, then killing off the oldest or least accessed tab that’s already open—thus retraining your brain to be judicious when opening them.SuperTabs
Getting quick access to a drop-down menu/list of your open tabs isn’t that groundbreaking, but SuperTabs throws in a search so you can jump to the one you need quick as a tabbing bunny. You can create keyboard shortcuts to make use of SuperTabs even faster.
OneTab
You open a lot of tabs. That can cause your Chrome browser to slow to a crawl. You can save all that memory by letting OneTab consolidate the clutter to one tab full of links to all those same sites.
Still with 5 stars after 24,000+ reviews, those with an egregious number of tabs open agree that this manager might be the best way to see and organize them all in one place, save them for later, recover tabs after a crash, and export tabs for sharing.
Tabs Outliner provides a look at all your tabs in a resizable, vertical window—tree-style, like you find in Windows Explorer. Closing a tab doesn’t remove it from the tree, making it ultra-easy to return to that page, so there’s no difference between an open or “saved” tab. You can even add notes from web pages. When you’re sick of all the work, there’s a button to close every tab and you’re out. Sometimes you just open too many tabs. Exceed 20 and the Chrome interface is nearly impossible to use. This extension manages the overflow, providing a bird’s-eye view of open tabs. It can search the open tabs and sort them by domain, title, or creation time. Sometimes there are tabs open in Chrome that you don’t need at that moment, such as an article you’re dying to read. If it can keep until after lunch, snooze that tab for later in the day, that evening, the next day, even the next week or next month. Pick a day. Or just mail it to yourself to read whenever.Ultidash
Turn your new tab into a full dashboard with all the extras you can imagine, pushing you to new levels of productivity. Ultidash builds in a to-do list, a site blocker with a Pomodoro Timer, integration with tools like Google Calendar and Gmail, and analytics about your work habits and sites visited.
IE Tab
In days of yore, many websites were optimized for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). If you have a tool like that at your work that developers never bothered to update, use IE Tab. It loads the page using IE’s rendering engine, while remaining within a Google Chrome tab. (It requires you to install an extra program called IETabHelper.exe for it to work.)
Video
This extension is about donations: use it to make sure money is donated to a charity whenever you’re using your PC to stream video on services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Forgot your place in a YouTube video from earlier, but can kind of remember what was happening? With Invideo, search for that spot—type in what was being said, and it searches the closed-captions to jump you to the right part. YouTube videos get a beautiful, configurable makeover with Magic Actions. Use your mouse wheel to control volume, select HD or cinema mode (with darkened background), go into the HD mode of your choice automatically, and turn off the auto-play as desired, among other fantastic options. If you want, it even hides the ads in videos and, best of all, hides the comments, where trolls live.This one is from Google itself, and works especially well with YouTube, but also some other videos: click the icon and the video you’re watching reduces to a thumbnail you can move around the screen as you do other “work” in the browser. Just keep the original video tab open so the video won’t close.
There are lots of Chrome extensions that will download video—but not from YouTube. That would go against Google’s rules. You can get around that by side-loading a Chrome extension like this one. It supports a huge number of sites, even a few of the more adult variety. (For more, read How to Download YouTube Videos.) We’re all relying a bit too much on Zoom Meetings to get through life, so make it easier than ever by putting Zoom in the browser toolbar for scheduling meetings, or instantly starting a meeting. The meeting URL gets shared instantly with participants via Google Calender.
