You probably wouldn’t buy a house and just leave it bare, foregoing any decorative accents that could liven up each room. You’d adorn the walls and add appliances to make your home life easier – and it’s a good idea to treat your internet browser the same way. Extensions let you do more in your online environment: here are the top five add-on apps, or extensions, you can get free for Chrome (currently the leading browser, commanding almost two-thirds of the market).
Grammarly
Type emails so quickly you often misspell? Anyone concerned about grammar and typos should get Grammarly, an extension that immediately identifies poor spelling and grammatical miscues. What’s fantastic is how Grammarly works for text fields in forms, social-media posts and anywhere else you input words.
Hover Zoom+
Now that we’re checking out photos regularly on social outlets like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, we need a tool to better view large images instantly, instead of thumbnails. That’s where Hover Zoom+ comes in: you just hover your mouse over a small pic to see an enlarged version. It doesn’t work for every site online, but it’s supporting more and more URLs with every update.
feedly
If you were an RSS fiend back in the day (RIP, Google Reader), then you’ll be clamouring for feedly, the ultimate blog and syndication curator on Chrome. A news reader like feedly can collect all the daily headlines from your favourite outlets, and you can group them into categories such as technology and politics.
Evernote Web Clipper
Bookmarks are so 2011. Time to supercharge how you save Web content, and Evernote Web Clipper is one of the most popular extensions in that department. Your saved pages can also be annotated with visual callouts, so you can mark up an article, say, to highlight a key quote you want to tweet about later.
Reddit Enhancement Suite
More than 36 million people are users on reddit, a massively popular forum with thousands of specialized pages. But how many of them know about the versatile RES app for Chrome, built to simplify the reddit experience? It adds an infinite scroll, instead of forcing you to click on the “next” button to go to the next page; hovering over a username pops out a fact window with info on that user; and viewing inline photos avoids clicking the link to see the image. RES is so useful, it’s surprising the reddit engineers haven’t integrated the extension’s features by default.
