Kerkia

Background

The Google Chrome browser is a great application, and it recently added support for extensions. Those are 3rd party applications that any developer can implement, and they are all available for free to anybody willing to use them. They can be added to Chrome very simply, as well as managed from Chrome afterwards. Here is a list of some of our favourite extensions.

Recommendations

AdThwart and AdBlock: those are two competing extensions that remove ads from web sites. The former also supports Facebook ads and flash animations, while the latter gives full flexibility as to the filtering lists you want to use and is adding Flash support as well. We use AdThwart at the moment but both extensions seem effective.

Beautify Facebook: makes Facebook a little nicer to look at.

Chrome Flags: port of FlagFox to Chrome; displays a country flag indicating the location of the websites you’re visiting.

Chrome Gestures and Smooth Gestures: two competing extensions that support mouse gestures; we prefer the latter one though both seem to work well.

Drag N Go: highlight and Drag texts for searching on Google, Bing, YouTube or any website of your choice.

Chrome Reader: a Google Reader extension that allows subscribing feeds directly from the Chrome address bar. Modeled after the standard Chrome “star” button.

Feedly: Feedly organizes your favourite sources in a magazine-like start page.

Google alerter: easy alert of unread items at Google services: Google Reader, Gmail, Google Wave, Google Voice. There are many such programs and we found this one works best.

Google Quick Scroll: quick Scroll lets you jump directly to the relevant bits of a Google search result.

Google Similar Pages beta:discover web pages similar to the page you're currently browsing. This extension from Google works well on the main page of most web sites.

GooglePreview and Xmarks Thumbnails: two competing extensions that add thumbnails to your Google search results so you can preview web sites before browsing to them.

IE Tab and IE Tab Classic: two competing extensions that allow displaying web pages using IE in a tab. Although the former is the regular one, we found IE Tab Classic offers more flexibility and hence prefer it. Both work well anyway.

Mini Google Maps: adds a toolbar button that shows a Google Map in a pop window, which makes it easy and fast to browse the map while working.

Search Box: lets you to easily search on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Bing, Twitter and more, with the help of a simple toolbar button.

Select To Get Maps: select addresses on any webpage to get useful maps links.

Tab Menu and VerticalTabs: two comepting extensions that show you all open tabs in a vertical menu from a click in the toolbar, and allow you to quickly search in them, drag and drop rearrange them, count them, etc. They both work well though we prefer VerticalTabs for its nicer UI polish.

Wikipedia Chromium Edition: the best way to search and browse Wikipedia on Chrome. Not very useful if you are an occasional user of Wikipedia, but handy if you are a heavy user.

WOT: Web of Trust is a safe browsing tool, which warns you about risky sites that cheat customers, deliver malware or send spam.

Xmarks Bookmarks Sync: backup and sync your bookmarks across computers and browsers. Xmarks is also available for Firefox, Safari and IE, as indicated in our article on bookmark synchronization.

Xmarks SearchTabs: SearchTabs enhances your Google search with tabs containing the top web sites related to your search, grouped by topic. It slightly slows down the page display but does occasionally provide useful information.

YouTube Auto Replay: adds an Auto Replay button in Youtube Page.