Google Chrome is the ultimate productivity booster
Often times, I find myself marvelling at Google Chrome. Google’s take on web browsers, that is jam packed full of extensions and apps; not to mention that it’s a fully capable, fast browser too. But this post is more aimed at Google Chrome’s extensions, because they are what make the browser amazing.
As I’m writing this, I glance over at my Google Chrome toolbar and spot 8 Extensions that I’m running. I’ve got my favourite Password Manager, LastPass, the instant push service that lets you send anything instantly to any one of your devices, PushBullet and the best web collector, Pocket.
I’ve also got 2 Evernote extensions - Clearly, which spruces up any web page of clutter to help you focus on the text/content only (extremely helpful!), and Evernote’s Web Clipper, an very helpful tool for collecting interesting links, text, images, and even entire web pages to your Evernote… annotating them, sharing them… it does everything.
The last 3 Extensions are all exceptional in my opinion. The first one is the TunnelBear extension. It connects to the TunnelBear VPN service and turns any network activity in Chrome pass through a VPN, essentially securing my browsing and somewhat anonymizing it.
The second last Extension is called Markdown Here which lets you write in Markdown in many websites that do not allow easy, Rich formatting of text. I use it in combination with Gmail and Evernote Web, and it works flawlessly!
And the very last Extension is called uBlock which is the lightest Ad-Blocking Extension available. I used to used Adblock Plus before. And although it fulfilled it’s functionality, it did it in a pretty slacky way - ABP was slow, and extremely resource heavy. Given Google Chrome is a pretty resource hungry application on its own, ABP was just too much of an overhead to bear. So I switched to uBlock instead, and have not looked back! They support most platforms, and most browsers.
And that’s all of my Chrome Extensions!
There’s tonnes more Apps that I downloaded from the convenient Chrome Webstore. And through this combination of Extensions and Chrome Apps, I’ve turned my Linux Laptop 100x more productive on the web front.
Update: It’s 2017 and I use a new set of extensions altogether now. Maybe I’ll do another write up soon with what I have on my Chrome today :)
