Google Chrome is a great browser, and with extensions it gets even better. Here are five extensions I love, and that might be helpful for others too.
Readability Redux
This one takes an article or blog post page and presents it in a reading-friendly format, leaving out all the clutter (sidebars, navigation menus, etc.) and also with a customized font and text styling that makes it more suitable for reading and printing.
A blog post shown in readability mode
I was envy when Safari 5 went out with this as a core feature, so much that I actually considered switching now that Safari has got extensions too. I detest to read articles and blog posts with all the clutter of the page. Particularly when you intend to print the article for further reading, not always web sites provide a good printed alternative, if they provide one at all.
Proxy Switchy!
This one I couldn’t live without. It’s pretty much the equivalent of FoxyProxy on Firefox, if you ever used that. It allows you to define several proxy configurations for you to switch to, and you can also create rules so that different specific web-sites that you define are automatically routed through certain proxies all the time, without you having to remember switching. For an active Tor user like me, this one is very handy.
Twitter share this page
Tweetie for Mac is great. It helps you keep informed of tweets from those you follow, and you can tweet yourself as well. But when you’re on Chrome reading a web page that you feel you ought to share with the world, it’s simpler to use this extension instead. Otherwise you would need to manually copy and paste the URL and then type your message.
With ‘Twitter share this page’ you just press a twitter icon on the right side of the address bar and voilá! Chrome opens Twitter in another tab with your message ready to be sent, or to be customized first if you wish. It automatically uses the web page title as a message along with the URL already shortened if needed.
XML Tree
Ever tried to load a XML document in Chrome? It simply shows the text without all the node tags and structure of the XML. This extension fixes this odd behavior, showing the XML tree structure. It says it allows you to collapse and expand nodes, but that doesn’t work for me, perhaps because I am using Chrome 6 from the Dev channel.
An XML Document being shown as a structured tree of nodes
For a developer like myself this one is a must. I always wondered why this was not a core feature of the browser itself, like it is in Firefox. Even for uneducated users who know nothing about XML, the structured presentation will almost always be more friendly and comprehensible than the default soup of text.
Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer
I have a couple of other extensions from Google itself, but this one is the most useful. Every time you click a PDF, Word or PowerPoint document on the web, it’ll show a preview using Google Docs’ interface, from which you’ll be able to download the document if you wish.
An online PDF file being shown in the Google Docs viewer
Before this, my downloads folder was always full of lots of documents that I once opened just to take a short look and discard. Now I can have a glimpse of what I clicked on, before I decide if I want to keep it.
Get Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer
Other extensions I use
Besides this featured five extensions above, there are a few more I use occasionally.
- ChromeAccess — Quick access to all (relevant) ‘about:’ and ‘chrome://’ pages.
- Gmail Notifier — Get a desktop notification when you receive a new email.
- Google Dictionary — View definitions easily as you browse the web.
- Tab Menu — Select, close, rearrange, and search your tabs from a toolbar menu.
- Webpage Screenshot — Captures a screenshot of a whole page beyond scroll.
- User-Agent Switcher — Spoofs navigator.userAgent and navigator.vendor strings for specific sites.
- Session Manager — Save sessions of your opened tabs and windows, and quickly re-open them whenever you like.
Also, take a look at this list of recommended extensions, from Google itself!
But not everything is perfect…
I am yet to find a youtube downloader extension that actually works. I’ve tried a few with no success. Currently I have to resort to Safari 5 which just recently got extensions support and there’s a pretty good one for this purpose. Besides that, there’s nothing left that I need and haven’t found.
Have something to share about this? What extensions do you find useful? Is there some feature you need for which there’s no suitable extension yet?