10 Addons You Have to Know About for Google Chrome

Posted 08/10/2010 at 2:40pm | by David Murphy

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A lot can be said about Google Chrome. And most of it should come as no surprise to you, the die-hard PC user that likely has more browsers installed within your operating system than games on your hard drive.

That’s not intended to be a disparaging statement; it’s celebratory. You’re a geek. You want to get the best browsing experience possible, which often involves jumping from browser to browser depending on what extensions or add-ons you like using, how you like pages rendered, and other miscellaneous—yet important—facets of the many available browsers you can choose from.

Well, a lot has changed since Chrome’s debut in late 2008. The gap between Mozilla’s extension library and Google’s has narrowed considerably. In fact, you can pretty much replicate an identical experience in each browser—for the most part, you’ll find extensions to fit just about anything you want to do.

But that certainly doesn’t help you when you get to the brass tacks of it all: Which extensions should you use? On a new installation of Chrome, what’s the top-ten list of items you need to download before you run your first Google search; read your first Maximum PC article; chuckle at your first lolcat?

Well, that’s what we’re here for. Let’s begin.

Xmarks

Xmarks the spot, as the joke goes. In this case, the “spot” is, “your comprehensive collection of bookmarks that you don’t want to lose every time you hop to another system or web browser.” And you won’t, not with this awesome extension. For Xmarks gives you an automatic method for synchronizing your browser bookmarks to a centralized server—the “cloud,” as it were—which you can then pull down onto any applicable browser installation… anywhere.

Of course, you might not want your repository of lolcat sites to populate your Xmarks-enhanced work computer. And that’s totally fine. The extension allows you to set up separate profiles for each PC, if you so choose, to give you even more control over which bookmarks go where. No matter what, however, your bookmarks will always stay on the cloud. Reinstall your OS, buy a new computer, switch to Firefox—you’ll be rocking the same bookmark setup forevermore.

Chrome Notepad

I place Chrome Notepad right below Xmarks because the two, in some strange way, are quite similar in their functionality—and they go about synchronizing data between your Chrome browser installations in a near-identical way. In this case, Chrome Notepad is an extension that pops up a little writing window within your Chrome browser, which you can use to leave notes to yourself in any particular font size (or window size) you want.

The genius of the is extension is that it drops these notes into a folder within Chrome’s bookmarks listings, which it then synchronizes throughout any browser you’ve installed the extension into. The extension even remembers the exact space where you last left your cursor within the notepad window—that’s dedication, let me tell you. Anyway, for an ideal to-do list that you can modify with, well, your novella in progress… look no further than Chrome Notepad.

Foxish Live RSS

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And Foxish Live RSS is a blatant replication of Mozilla Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature. What’s that, you say? I applaud your dedication to the Chrome platform, if so. Live Bookmarks is a fancy Firefox way of having both a bookmark folder and an RSS feed in one. Instead of having some kind of separate subscription and reading mechanism for RSS feeds, Firefox allows one to transform an RSS feed into its own bookmark folder of-sorts.

Thus, whenever you click on said folder in your bookmark toolbar or drop-down menu, you’re presented with a list of the most recently updated RSS items as individual pages. Easy enough, right? Foxish Live RSS replicates this feature for Chrome near-perfectly—instead of automatic updates, however, it refreshes your feeds for new information every five minutes or so.

AdBlock

Ahh yes, Adblock. Though I shake my fist at this extension for its ability to deprive you of the very Internet-based advertising revenue that my employers depend on to pay me, I nevertheless can’t help but agree that certain forms of internet advertising are downright annoying, if not deplorable. Adblock is one of the best methods for ridding your browser of these obtrusive forms of advertising in one fell swoop.

The beauty of Adblock is that it’s super-customizable, giving you the opportunity to best match the extension’s powers to your specific uses and browsing patterns. Like the text ads that accompany Google search results, but want to nuke everything else? Not a problem.

Heck, you can even use one of Adblocks pre-created filter lists as a “default” level of blocking if you don’t really feel like customizing things up. Manually add advertisements to the list that Adblock doesn’t catch or, more importantly, whitelist sites that you want to support with a click or two cough maximum pc dot com cough.

IE Tab

I know, I know. Why would you ever want to jump back to Internet Explorer, of all things, if you’re already rocking one of the best browsers on the market? Sadly, not all web applications agree with you on that one—especially in the corporate environment. I won’t name names, but there are definitely some instances where I’ve found myself having to fire up good ol’ Internet Explorer at work due to some kind of Chrome rendering issue with a particular app.

Well. Never again! IE Tab allows you to summon the IE rendering engine within Chrome itself, giving you the best of both worlds: one unified browser that you can use to view pages, combined with the dreadful Internet Explorer experience that you might need to access a particular page. It’s as simple as that. Just hit the appropriate button in your Chrome toolbar to jump to IE-within-Chrome, and you’re good to go!

Keep reading for 5 more addons!