Hey, Mac People! Here are 10 Great Google Chrome Extensions
The newest Mac Chrome isn’t perfect. It still has a few kinks, like, say, causing WordPress and Tumblr to crash repeatedly — bad news if you’re a blogger, to say the least. (Paging Google’s engineering team.) But extensions really do add value in a meaningful way: even if you’re not a total computer geek, you’ll find that they can do a lot.
You can access Chrome’s extension manager by typing chrome://extensions/ in your search bar (no HTTP prefix), and you can browse the selection of Chrome extensions at Google’s official page.
Below, a few of our favorite Mac-friendly Chrome extensions: Click on their names to go to their download pages.
We found that this really delivered as promised and make browsing noticeably faster. It does make search boxes for Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Oneriot appear when you highlight text — and you can’t customize that selection — but speed is speed.
Evernote is a fairly new service — its open beta came out in mid-2008, and its stable release came out just this month — but we predict you’ll be seeing a lot of it soon, thanks to its ease of use and clean interface. Plugging it into Chrome makes it that much simpler to use.
Crowdsourcing trustworthiness lets you know what you’re getting into and share your knowledge with others, making the Web a better place in the process. Don’t Google Jessica Biel without it.
InvisibleHand: “InvisibleHand discreetly notifies you if the product you’re browsing is available more cheaply from another retailer. The notification provides a convenient link straight to the relevant product page on the competing retailer’s website.”
If you’ve ever wasted far too much time jumping from retailer to retailer to save those extra four dollars, you’ll appreciate InvisibleHand, which automatically compares prices across retailers in an unintrusive tab and provides you with links to competing deals. It’s not yet terribly comprehensive — it worked for us on Amazon, Buy.com, and Newegg, but not on Bestbuy.com or walmart.com — but it’s a start, and hopefully later versions will have even more meat.
Because you’ve got to know the weather, right?
The Chrome-ready version of the popular mobile task manager Remember the Milk, ChromeMilk organizes the things that you know you need to do but always seem to forget in one always-accessible dropdown menu.
This extension is a little insidery and may not be of that much interest to civilians, but if you work on the Internet and the idea of pageranks, indexed pages, backlinks, and keywords for any given site at the push of a button causes you to fall out of your chair in delight, you’ll probably love ChromeSEO. If that idea causes you to fall out of your chair because you have dozed off in boredom, it may not be for you.
Much, much prettier alternative than iGoogle’s personalized pages. If you’re on the fence, the link has screenshots.
Yes, it’s a little odd that this is currently the top featured Google Chrome extension, but who doesn’t like pranks? Not functional, per se, but a clever one-off joke.
The description text might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t: if you’ve gulped and made the jump to Chrome, one of the first things you’ll notice is that unlike many other browsers, which support tabs when you open a new webpage but keep new windows as the default, the functionality-minded Chrome is all about tabs, tabs, tabs. This handy tab visualizer makes them a lot more manageable.
Remember: if you OD on extensions and want to disable or uninstall some (here’s looking at you, Upside Down), go to chrome://extensions/ for the extensions manager. And you can get plenty more at Chrome’s extensions page. And you can download the latest Chrome for Mac here.
Did we miss any of your favorite Chrome extensions? Tell us in the comments section below.
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