Five Chrome extensions I recommend to absolutely everyone
Don’t surf the web without em’.
I try to keep the number of extensions I have installed to a minimum. While incredibly useful, Chrome extensions can also be highly invasive to your privacy, so I recommend sticking to just a handful.
Here are my top five, that recommend everyone should use.
A password manager (in my case, LastPass)
If you’re not already using a password manager, you should. They consolidate all your passwords in one place, which means you can actually use secure passwords and avoid the risks that come with password re-use.
Having a good Ad blocking tool is essential, and uBlock is your best bet. The tool is open-source and is generally considered the industry-leading ad-blocker.
I do, however, highly recommend disabling it for websites that you find useful and want to support. uBlock makes this easy. Just click the big “on/off” symbol and it will disable blocking for that particular website.
If you ever run into issues on the web such as broken pages, or log-in errors, it's usually a good idea to clear your cache and cookies.
Having to clear your browser's entire cookie history to solve one dodgy page, however, is annoying. It logs you out of everything and brings up constant captchas.
This cookie remover extension makes diagnosing your problem a breeze. With one click, it clears your cookies for the tab you currently have open.
We do so much writing on our browsers, including in emails and productivity tools, so it’s worth getting it right.
The free version of Grammarly does a great job as a spell-checker. It’s also fairly easy to disable for a particular page if it gets in the way.
This one might be more controversial. I highly recommend paying for and subscribing to news sources you use (I personally pay for the Guardian and the New York Times), but sometimes, you just need to bypass a paywall to read a specific article in a publication you don’t usually read.
This tool does a great job of that, although it only supports websites that allow crawlers like Google to read their content. It’s not officially included on the Chrome web store but can be easily installed manually with instructions on GitHub.
