You've probably heard of and might even be using extensions like AdBlock and Ghostery, but there are hundreds of great extensions for Chrome just waiting to be discovered. But who has time to trawl through all of them?
Well, Transcendit have done the leg work for you. Here are 8 of our favourite Chrome extensions that are guaranteed to improve your browser experience for free - and save you time while doing it.
1. Lazarus
How many times have you spent valuable minutes filling in a form, just to accidentally click back and watch all of your hard work vanish into the ether? Lazarus understands that at some point you'll make a stupid mistake, and remembers everything that you type into an online form . Then all you have to do if something goes wrong is to press the little icon in the corner of the box you were writing in. Lazarus loads up whichever version you like, and you can avoid throwing your computer through a window.
2. Honey
Honey understands you don't want to pay full price on everything (or anything). So it recognises which website you're browsing and brings up a whole host of recently used coupons . The ones closest to the top of the list are those most successfully used, with the ones rarely used being closer to the bottom. It is a US extension, which means it spends a lot of time saying how many dollars you'll be saving - but there are plenty of UK sites that it works on. Who's for takeaway?
This awesome little extension takes all the frustration out of images with text. Install this on your browser and you can literally highlight the text from any image , and copy and paste to your heart's content. This works for scanned documents, pictures and even photographs, as long as the text is written horizontally and is clear enough. You can even amend text within the image itself, or translate text in an image that is written in another language. A great little extension that certainly saves time.
4. Web of Trust
Web of Trust (WOT) takes all the risk out of browsing on unknown sites. When you search something on Google, WOT takes the list of results and checks them against its database to see if the site is trustworthy , and child friendly. There's a handy little circle that comes after each of your search results which indicates how 'good' the site is, from red to green. You can also rate sites yourself once you've viewed the content, or hover over the circle to check a comprehensive 'scorecard' for the website before committing to a left click.
5. LastPass
A great free password manager , LastPass sits comfortably in your browser until you come across a login screen. Then either fill in the info and ask LastPass to look after it for you, or click the star in the login bar and select which account you'd like to log in with. You just remember one master password (which you should make something really good!) and LastPass takes care of everything else. Forms, passwords and card information stored securely just waiting to be used - forgetting passwords is a thing of the past.
6. Pocket
Pop Pocket on your browser and it works like bookmarks - but much better. Any page that you've visited that you want to come back to, or something that you don't have time to read that second can be 'pocketed'. The extension then moves a copy of the document, video or image to your Pocket dashboard, where you can view it offline on any of your devices that you've synced up. You can also tag each item as you save it, so you can sort through all of your pocketed stuff easily. Awesome.
7. Noisli
Although this is a weird one, Noisli works on the principle that you are much more productive when there is some background noise. With that in mind, Noisli generates combinations of natural sounds (rain, thunder, birds, waves and a whole host of others) to keep you in a productive state of mind . Just save the combos to your favourites, and you can play it whenever you need a bit of noise. You can control the volume of the sounds right from the extension. Who says you can't be working and listen to a babbling brook at the same time?
8. Momentum
Momentum replaces your Chrome dashboard, so that when you open a new tab you are welcomed with a gorgeous photograph, the weather, the time, a personal welcome and an inspirational quote to get you excited about Monday morning. You can also add your favourite links to a dropdown menu, add a goal for the day and search Google from within it too. All that motivation has to save some time, right?
