Before getting onto Chrome extensions directly, let’s have a quick look at how Google Chrome evolved itself in the past one and a half years to become a real threat for leading web browsers.
Since the launch of Google Chrome, I have been one of its all time fans and also a loyal Chrome user for over a year now. Although Chrome faced some level of criticism in its early days, i stuck rock hard on Chrome for certain reasons, except once.
After the early excitement for Google last year, it has seen some decline for a while but then kept rising steadily till date. And this steady growth credit partly goes to Google’s aggressive promotional bandwagon, starting from its own homepage to Orkut, YouTube among other web properties. Google Chrome kept improving and quite soon(100 days from the date of launch), the beta tag was dropped from Google Chrome.
Latest stuff that has completed this Google browser in every sense is Chrome Extensions. In my belief, this is the moment of avalanche for Google Chrome. In the coming couple of months, tens of million of users will be making a switch from Firefox and IE to Chrome. Google Chrome for Mac is also out now so Safari is no more safe at all.
As i have experimented with a plenty of Chrome extensions by now, i have some recommendations for folks out there.
Here are some notable Chrome extensions…Here you go !
Google Mail Checker
This extension is meant to notify you of any new mails hitting your Gmail Inbox. The number of unread mails gets displayed on the ‘extension icon’ and updates dynamically as you read the mails. Wouldn’t say that it’s a great utility but as i am active in my Gmail accounts only, i find it helpful. There’s a similar Chrome extension for YahooMail as well but I dumped YahooMail some 4 yrs back so useless for me.
Chromed Bird
It’s a lightweight & deal simple twitter extension for Chrome. If you’re a twittering soul and use(or switching to) Google Chrome as well, you need this ! You might also find Brizzly(I tried and then dumped it) as one of the options to try as well, but my experience wasn’t too good with it. It’s slow and i hate apps that respond slowly(too slow in case of Brizzly). If you love things simple and useful, go Chromed Bird
Cooliris
This is one Firefox extension that forced me back to Firefox at some point, but only temporarily. And now, i am happy to have it on Chrome. Go get it.
It is one extension that’s serving as a great utility to me.
In their own words
“After you click on a Google search result, Quick Scroll may appear on the bottom-right corner of the page, showing one or more bits of text from the page that are relevant to your query. Clicking on the text will take you to that part of the page”
Aviary Screen Capture
This is an extension that will serve as a Web based Photo editor for you. If you’re a Photoshop guy then you would find things more comfortable. After editing the photo, you can either save it on your desktop or choose the cloud to save the photos. I see this extension as the close cloud based alternative to desktop based Adobe Photoshop application. It’s not capable to the height of Photoshop but it stands somewhere at least. You can try the Picnik extension for web based image editing as well
This will be useful for bloggers and webmasters, to easily keep an eye on the pagerank of various webpages.