We’ve been faffing about like mad between Firefox and Chrome for months now, unable to decide which browser to stick with.
We find Chrome more stable, but there’s still a few extensions that we miss from Firefox, so it’s not unusual to have both browsers open and tabbed up to the max.
In an attempt to woo ditherers like us, Google has posted up a list of their favourite Chrome extension:
- Opinion Cloud: Summarizes comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos to provide an overview of the crowd’s overall opinion.
- Google Voice: All sorts of helpful Voice features directly from the browser. See how many messages you have, initiate calls and texts, or call numbers on a site by clicking on them.
- AutoPager. Automatically loads the next page of a site. You can just scroll down instead of having to click to the next page.
- Turn Off the Lights: Fades the page to improve the video-watching experience.
- Google Dictionary: Double-click any word to see its definition, or click on the icon in the address bar to look up any word.
- After the Deadline: Checks spelling, style, and grammar on your emails, blog, tweets, etc.
- Invisible Hand: Does a quick price check and lets you know if the product you are looking at is available at a lower price elsewhere.
- Secbrowsing: Checks that your plug-ins (e.g. Java, Flash) are up to date.
- Tineye: Image search utility to find exact matches (including cropped, edited, or re-sized images).
- Slideshow: Turns photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Google Images into slideshows.
- Google Docs/PDF Viewer: Automatically previews pdfs, powerpoint presentations, and other documents in Google Docs Viewer.
- Readability: Reformat the page into a single column of text.
- Chromed Bird: A nice Twitter viewing extension.
- Feedsquares: Cool way of viewing your feeds via Google Reader.
- ScribeFire: Full-featured blog editor that lets you easily post to any of your blogs.
- Note Anywhere: Digital post-it notes that can be pasted and saved on any webpage.
- Instant Messaging Notifier: IM on multiple clients.
- Remember the Milk: The popular to-do app.
- Extension.fm: Turns the web into a music library.
That should be enough for us to be getting along with, but a full list of extensions can also be found at: chrome.google.com/extensions.
Read the comic
To introduce the Chrome browser, Google commissioned one of our favourite comic artists, Scott McCloud to draw a cartoon strip. If you’ve got ten minutes to spare, it’s well worth reading again.
