We spend most of our time on the Internet facing our browser. This is evidently shown with the rise of Chromebooks. We’re kinda heading back to the days of terminal computing but this time we’re connected to the cloud instead.
Here’s a list of amazing Chrome extensions we can’t live without.
Capture, Explain and Send Screenshots
This is one handy extension for explaining yourself. You simply take a screenshot of your browser window, then free to annotate the image and then one click upload it to imgur with a link ready to share. This extension is donationware, meaning you get premium features just by donating any amount you wish, depending on how cheap you are 😉 You can try out the free version and then fork out some change when you feel like it. We highly suggest you upgrade to support the developer.
Take a full or partial snapshot of any website or even upload an image into the cloud that you’d like to share or send to someone. You can draw arrows, lines, circles to point out things or even move, erase or delete selections and even annotate the snapshot by placing text right on the image.
Then you can copy the image to the clipboard and paste it into your email or download the image onto your desktop. You can also get a direct link to the image and share it on Facebook or Twitter with direct links to the image.
Lastpass: Free Password Manager
I used to avoid using a password manager in the past because I just didn’t like storing all my passwords online. After careful scrutiny of the tech and strong encryption used, I decided to give it a go and now I’m a premium user never looking back.
LastPass utilizes AES 256bit encryption implemented with PBKDF2 encryption keys and salted hashing. All sensitive user data is encrypted and decrypted locally on the user’s machine, so that only encrypted sensitive information is ever synced with LastPass.
One of the reasons I upgraded to the premium version was because it supported a mobile app which is essential when you heavily rely on Lastpass. All my passwords are now randomly generated and all I need to remember is only my super long master password.
This extension is the one which is set and forget. It blocks most advertisements everywhere and the only time I need to interact with it is when I visit a certain website that forces you to enable ads to view their content.
Used by over 50 million people, a free ad blocker that blocks ALL annoying ads, malware and tracking. It blocks YouTube, Facebook and ads everywhere else on the web. Oh … and they have a great ad 🙂
Noisli is playing right now as this post is being written. It feels like I’m sitting beside the stream with the forest on my right. Such a soothing feeling and brings out the creativity side.
This extension improves your focus and boosts your productivity. It’s easy to block out annoying noises and create the right environment for working or relaxing.
Noisli is the best and most beautifully designed productivity companion throughout your day. No matter if you are in an environment where it is too loud or too quiet, with Noisli you can create and listen to your favorite background sounds in order to focus and concentrate on your tasks.
If you watch a lot of videos and have to regularly scan through them to find your information, this is the best extension to use.
You can speed up, slow down, advance and rewind any HTML5 video with quick shortcuts. It will help you optimize your video viewing by allowing you to make quick playback speed adjustments, as well as rewind the video to hear the last few second one more time. We don’t read at a constant speed, and we talk much slower than we read – there is no reason why we have to listen at a constant speed and at a slow rate.
It’s easy to control this plugin by keyboard shortcuts and once you get used to it, it’s like second nature. If you prefer other shortcuts, want to change the increment value, or want the player to remember your playback speed in the future, head into the settings page and customize it to your heart’s content.
The most popular extension in this field for tabs management is called OneTab. I would recommend that you try both out and decide which one suits you better. I’ve chosen Session Buddy just for the sake of how the tabs can be closed individually and then accessed again from the extension window. OneTab’s way of managing tabs is to close them all at once. I like to be selective on exactly which tabs I want to close thus my choice is this. That being said, there’s another popular one called The Great Suspender. It works by suspending your unused tabs, not so much for tab management.
Session Buddy is a session manager for your browser that allows you to see all open tabs in one single tab. You can save and restore your tabs and restore them later. This is great for freeing up memory and avoiding tab clutter.
I find it also useful to recover from a browser or system crash. Everything is searchable so you don’t worry about closing your tab and it being gone forever.
So there you have it. All 6 Chrome extensions that help increase your productivity. Do you have one that you can’t live without? Let everyone know in the comments.