10 Most Popular Google Chrome Extensions
In todays world we spend a lot of time accessing and browsing the internet and thus, we end up spending a lot of time working in a web browser window. Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are the two most common browsers being used today. Firefox's secret of success is the huge repository of extensions it has. The ability to customize with numerous add-ons has made Firefox versatile in its functionality and hence it is adopted by users of each kind. Google Chrome on the other hand is based on the Webkit layout engine, which is known for its excellent rendering speeds.
Besides this, Google has introduced a number of other features and enhancements in Chrome such as the JavaScript processing engine V8, and insanely fast loading speeds along with other improvements such as sandboxing and private browsing mode for improved security. Even if you add up a dozens of add-ons, called Chrome Extensions, Google Chrome maintains its pace and beats Mozilla Firefox which tends to get a little slow on adding more than 10 plugins. Although, Mozzila Firefox gets an edge, when talking about the number of plugins that are available for Firefox, the Chrome Extensions gallery is now fully up and running and the number of "awesome" extensions is multiplying at a rapid rate.
The Chrome Extensions gallery is quite simple, as by the old principle: Google’s popularity lies in it’s simplicity, but it has features that provide juicy information to users, including one of the most interesting, focused on compiling and the most popular extensions of Google Chrome.
Following is the list of 10 most popular Chrome Extensions that one must have:
AdBlock: Irritated of those crazy annoying Flash ads that seem to be popping up just everywhere and anywhere? Facebook ads? Google add other pop-up adds? Block all advertisements on all web pages using this wonderful extension. AdBlock just blocks each and every advertisement on a website, all you see is the content you're looking for, and AdBlock manages the rest. A small notification in the bottom right corner of the screen lets you know when a pop-up has been blocked by AdBlock and you can stop Adblock from blocking pop-ups from individual sites if desired. Adblock indirectly shields you from speed and bandwidth thieves and thus gives you a faster browsing experience as it prevents the unwanted clutter from loading. You can mould this extension which ever way you can. AdBlock provides you with plenty of options for customization, it allows users to specify a white-list under which the users can mention the domains for which they don't want the advertisements to be blocked, select specific filters. The users can also submit ads that Adblock missed from blocking. Adblock is indeed very effective and easy to use, and should be installed by anyone seeking a faster, smoother, less cluttered and a rich Web-browsing experience.
To Install - Click Here
Google Mail Checker Plus: Don't want to sign in Google Talk for receiving e-mail notifications? Use Google Mail Checker Plus - Chrome Extension. Whenever you receive a new mail in your gmail mailbox this extension pops-out a Desktop and a sound notification. Google Mail Checker lets you open the mail priview window and gives you the functionality to read, delete, archive your mail, without even leaving the current tab you are in. Not only this, Google Mail Checker plus also known as GMC+ provides you with the functionality through which you can mark your mails as spam or star them for follow up and lets you monitor all your labels. This cool extension also provides you with Google Apps Mail Account support. The mailto-links that you click on are automatically opened in your Gmail or Google Apps Mail account by this extension.
To Install - Click Here
IE Tab: This extension gives you a virtual rendering engine of Internet Explorer while you are still in Google Chrome. Thus, this gives you the power of accessing the web-site as if it was opened in IE. Internet Explorer isn't as popular as it used to be, but still while browsing the internet you might come across a web-site that is still not equipped to load on browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Not only websites but a lot of new and legacy web applications are developed specifically for IE with ActiveX Controls. For example: the new Microsoft Office Web Apps wont run, if you open them in Google Chrome. IE Tab Google Chrome extension tricks these persnickety IE-only sites into working in Chrome. IE Tab for Google Chrome is a powerful but simple to use extension. The icon of the IE Tab appears next to Chrome's address bar and--uh-oh--you stumble across a web site that' is specifically designed for IE, you just need to click on the extension's icon and the current page will seamlessly reload and will be functioning and displaying as though the site is being viewed in Internet Explorer.
To Install - Click Here
Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer Are you tired of Downlaoding PDFs, DOCs files? Do you hate the way Google Chrome gets stuck when clicked on a PDF file link? Well, then this great official Chrome extension from Google has come to your rescue! Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension can make your browsing easier, and help documents and PDFs feel more like a part of the Internet. This extension lets you view all PDFs, DOCs and PowerPoint files in Google Docs by default, as the documents are rendered on Google’s servers, it’s often faster to preview large files than to download them to your computer. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension seems to work well for the most part, but lacks the ability to save a PDF to your Google Docs account.
To Install - Click Here
Cooliris Searching on the web or your desktop was never so much of fun!! The 3D Wall of Cooliris speeds up image search on Google Images, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and hundreds of supported Web sites. This chrome extension gives simply the fastest, the richest and the most stunning way to browse photos and videos from the Web or your desktop. Cooliris generates a cool “3D Wall” of your content from hundreds of supported websites or from images on Picasa on your own computer, and lets you effortlessly scroll your content on an infinite 3D Wall without having to click from page to page. This extension also comes with Cooliris Channels, which lets you access more than 1.5 million TV episodes, movies, and titles from over 70 leading content providers by a single clik. Through Cooliris you can also enjoy premium content services from Hulu, CBS, Showtime, ESPN, FOX, and many more.
To Install - Click Here
FastestChrome - Browse Faster This extension lets you make the most of Google Chrome. Fastest Chrome does not tweak Chrome to make it use less memory, it rather makes the your browsing experience fastest (not faster!). FastestChrome enable related searches, endless scrolling, and many more. Multi-page articles can be really irritating at times. Don't you wish you could just read the whole article on one page rather than finding the paging and waiting for each page of the article to load? One of the ways in which Fastest Chrome can help you is to provide you with endless scrolling option. FastestChrome automatically loads the next page of a multi page article that you’re reading, saving you the trouble of paging and waiting. This extension also automatically includes relevant search results from other search engines in your Google search results thus, helping you to search what you want much faster. With this powerfull extension, you can simply highlight a word, from an automatic pop-up menu you can use to search for the highlighted word or phrase in a dictionary, Wikipedia, or any other search engine and even Twitter. And thats not all, FastestChrome automatically converts test URL to links and adds related articles to Wikipedia.
To Install - Click Here
WOT Do you face cyber-world security issues? Want to keep yourself safe from malicious backdoors on various websites? Want to keep your kids safe while they browse the web? This Chrome extension does it all. WOT lets you know which websites you can trust. The WOT chrome extension tool is a safe surfing tool for your Google Chrome that generates traffic-light rating symbols showing you which websites you can trust for safe surfing, shopping and searching on the web. WOT shields you from sites that deliver malware, adware or such any of such type of content. This extension makes sure that your kids do not come across inappropriate content while browsing the net. WOT extension automatically blocks, shows an alert and thus tries to stop you from viewing a website that has been flagged as a bad website. You can either decide to disregard the alert message or to bail out of the website. Thus, this Chrome extension manages most of the cyber-world content issues.
To Install - Click Here
RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) RSS Subscription extension automatically detects RSS feeds on the page that you are currently reading. When this extension finds RSS or atom feeds an RSS icon shows up in the Omnibox which allows you to click on it and preview the feed content and directly subscribe to the feeds on the page you are currently on. With this extension you can add any web based feed reader of your choice to the list of the four predefined feed readers like Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo.
To Install - Click Here
Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate This versatile tool is very useful for web designers, bloggers and anyone who want to provide feedback on web pages, or capture and share or save webpages. With this extension you can not only simply save (on your hard-disk) or share a webpage (with private hard urls, that facilitate safe sharing), but you can also annotate the screenshot with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text. If this is not enough, this tool lets you erase or hide information that you do not want to share or retain. This extension lets you crop and scroll through your PNG or JPEG screenshot. One important point worth noting is, Awesome Screenshot extension cannot take screenshots of Flash based objects. This is mainly because of limitation imposed by Google Chrome’s API.
To Install - Click Here
TooManyTabs We all love tabbed browsing but we often get stuck in finding the correct tab from tons of open tabs? Sometimes they are simply tabs we forgot to close, other times we leave these tabs open as they contain pages that we want to return to. If you open over 15 tabs in Google Chrome, forget about the page titles, Chrome starts hiding the favicon of the websites too. TooManyTabs for Chrome is a clever extension that helps you leave your tabs open to which you want to refer back to without all the clutter that a number of open tabs can cause. The interface of TooManyTabs is not quite simple, but after a bit of experimentation, it seems easy to use. TooManyTabs' icon appears adjacent to Chrome's address bar. On clicking on the icon a menu opens up and displays a nice preview of the tabs that you are currently working on. To open a tab you can simply click on a yellow arrow that appears next to the page. Clicking on the arrow moves the page over the list of "suspended tabs." In addition to the default "suspended tabs" column, this Chrome extensions give you the power to create multiple, editable and namable columns which makes it easy for you to organize suspended tabs into different categories in this extension. TooManyTabs is a great way to keep tabs that you need later open and do away with the cons of tabbed browsing and and the trouble of bookmarking them even if you don't require them later.
To Install - Click Here
