7 Chrome Extensions for Boosting Productivity
Since its launch in 2008, Google Chrome has become the most popular web browser in the world. One of the main reasons for Google Chrome’s huge popularity is its extensive customization options via their Extension Library. Extensions range in quality from silly and pointless to indispensably useful. Here, we’ve listed a few of the extensions that some of us at Checkmate have found to be effective for boosting productivity. Some are specific to our work as designers and developers, but most are applicable to anyone, regardless of your profession.
1. Momentum
Chrome’s default homepage is arguably a bit lacking. Its barebones aesthetic and simple grid of your most visited pages doesn’t look great and doesn’t provide much more functionality than a bookmark bar or pinned tabs. Luckily, there are several extensions dedicated to replacing and improving Chrome’s new tab page. One of our favorites is Momentum.
Momentum replaces Chrome’s new tab page with randomly selected gorgeous photos of nature. Front and center is a clock, a greeting, and a simple question: “What is your main focus for today?” Around the periphery are some useful mini-apps, including a current weather display, motivational quotes, and a to-do list. The idea is to make turn your new tab page into a home base to plan your day from, and it works pretty well for getting you off to a focused start when you launch Chrome.
2. Google Keep
Keep is Google’s own note-taking application. The standalone application is simple, letting you take, save, and share notes at keep.google.com or in the Android/iOS app. The Keep Chrome extension adds some great functionality, making Keep much more than just digital sticky notes. By clicking on the Keep extension icon, you can take a note that becomes associated with the webpage you’re currently visiting. When you return to the site later, the Keep icon will be yellow instead of the default grey, and you can click it to view the notes you took while on that site. Notes created this way can also be viewed at keep.google.com. Each note has a link to the page you were viewing when you created it so that you can easily keep track of them.
In many cases, nothing beats a screenshot as a reference tool. Windows and OSX have built-in tools for easily capturing everything visible on your screen (or a part of it), but in our line of work as designers and developers, we often find that we need to take screenshots of entire, long-scroll webpages.
Full Page Screen Capture does exactly what its name suggests, producing an image of an entire page by scrolling down, taking screenshots, and stitching the results together. The whole process usually takes just a few seconds, and typically creates an accurate image (animations can sometimes cause some difficulties).
For all of its great features, Chrome has also earned a reputation as a notorious memory hog. When several tabs are open, the browser can easily consume 2GB or more of RAM, hurting your system’s performance, and nothing kills productivity like having your browser or other programs freeze up and crash. The Great Suspender aims to help solve that problem.
The Great Suspender “suspends” tabs, stopping the site in that tab from running, but keeping the tab open so that you can reload it with just a click. You can set TGS to suspend tabs automatically after a certain amount of idle time, or suspend tabs manually when you know you won’t be using them for a while.
5. PushBullet
PushBullet is an extension that lets Android users send and receive SMS text messages from your computer through Chrome. With PushBullet, or the similar MightyText and SimplyText, you can keep your attention on a single device as you respond to important texts while working. Some might find this to be more distracting than simply using your phone for texts, but if you get a lot of work-related texts, than this extension can save you a lot of going back-and-forth between screens.
6. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer analyzes a website and displays the technologies that are used to create it with a single click. You can see the coding languages and frameworks that the site uses, as well as any analytics software or other integrations used. You can then click on any of the technologies listed to learn more about them. As a digital agency, potential clients often come to us looking to refresh the design of a site that hasn’t been updated in years, and don’t know the details of the stack that was originally used to build their site. A quick look with Wappalyzer gets us all the information we need to know about their tech.
An extension related to YouTube might seem like the antithesis of productivity, but bear with us a moment. YouTube is actually a very useful tool in its own right, featuring tutorials on virtually every subject imaginable — great for some quick on-the-job learning.
Their comment section, however, is another beast entirely. No matter the content of the video, nearly every comment thread devolves into a stunning display of vitriol, inane repetition, shameless self-promotion and poor spelling. Even glancing at them is typically a total waste of time at best, and an exercise in the erosion of your own humanity at worst.
With the “Hide YouTube Comments” Chrome extension, you can spare your brain an unnecessary dose of seething internet rage by hiding the comment thread on every YouTube video. Further saving you from yourself, the creator notes that “there is no option or button to show the comments again.”
