20 brilliant browser add-ons
Stay safe, save money and work faster
Browsers can be so much more than a simple window on the web. With a handful of carefully chosen add-ons, they can be the centre of your working day. Here ’s our pick of the 20 top extensions you should be installing today. We’ve focused on Chrome, Edge and Firefox in each instance, but as almost every browser – with the notable exception of Firefox – is now based on the Chrome rendering en gine, most will work with Chrome extensions. Microsoft has its own extensions library for Edge, to which we’ve linked below where appr opriate. However, where an extension isn’t featured there, you can install it from the Chrome Web Store by clicking the “Add to Chrome” button – just as you would in Chrome itself.
Avast Online Security
A favourite trick of many scammers is to register a domain that’s just one or two characters away from the real thing and design a UI to match. No wonder so many people end up feeding them sensitive data. This extension from AV specialist Avast provides real-time notifications when you stray onto a suspicious site, aggregating data from over 400 million users to identify domains you should be worried about. Phishing sites begone.
Bitwarden
We’re strong advocates for using a password manager. Only having to remember a single master password to unlock your keychain means there’s no reason not to use unique credentials for every site you visit. Better yet, having those credentials synchronise across multiple devices saves you the trouble (and the risk) of writing them down.
There are a lot of password managers to choose from, but our current pick is Bitwarden ( see issue
320, p59). It’s open-source and works on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and iPadOS. You can install Bitwarden apps on these, as well as accessing it from the co mmand line on Windows, Linux and the Mac.
There are plugins for Chrome, Opera,
Firefox, Edge, Safari, Brave and Tor Browser and, best of all, the free tier will do almost everything you need.
There are business and personal plans and the former even has a gratis offering for two-person firms. In the personal tier, a free account gives you access to the apps, synchronisation between them across all devices, a password generator, 2FA, the ability to securely share passwords and more. Upgrading to the $10-a-year premium plan rolls in U2F and Duo, plus physical authentication using YubiKey and the ability to share encrypted files. $40 a year buys you the family plan, which extends these features to six users.
Buffer
Frequently posting interesting content at regular intervals is the best way to build a loyal social following. But good content is like the proverbial bus: nothing for hours then you find three good links. Rather than holding two back to post later, feeding them all into Buffer at once adds them to a queue, from which Buffer itself will post one item every time a set interval rolls around.
The free plan lets you stack up ten items at a time – but slots become free again once they’ve been posted, so it should suffice for most home and solo business users ($15 a month buys you a 100-item queue, while $65 ups it to 2,000). You can add links manually at
buffer.com or install the browser extension, which lets you tack them onto your queue directly without breaking your creative flow.
Checker Plus for Gmail
If your email workflow is focused on Gmail, Checker Plus promises to make it more efficient. It centralises notifications for multiple accounts, and lets you read and delete incoming messages without opening the webmail app. There are comp anion Checker Plus apps for Goog le Drive and Google Calendar, to o. Find them at
Chrome Remote Desktop
A must -install for anyone who has repu rposed an old PC or Mac as a headless server, and for anyone giving remote family members socially distance d tech support, Chrome Remo te Desktop simplifies the job of securely controlling one computer from another. It doesn’t require anything other than a Chrome browse r running at each end of the conn ection, and greatly simplifies the ta sk of configuring a safe connection. That’s a boon when you have to talk a remote party through setting it up over the phone.
Cookie AutoDelete
Reduce the amount of clutter – and the number of trackers – left behind when you depart a website. Cookie AutoDelete wipes out any cookies not being actively used when you leave a web page. If you’ve had enough of working your way through endless lists of permissions every time you visit a new site, this could be just the tool you’re after.
FlowCrypt
Secure your outgoing Gmail emails (including G Suite) using OpenPGP so that messages and attachments are encrypted and only accessible to
recipients wh o have the other half of a key pair. At tachments of up to 5MB are supported for free; for $5 a month, the limit is raised to 25MB.
Honey
arching for valid voucher codes can take so long that any savings you make are outweighed by the cost of your time. Not any more. Covering 30,000-plus stores, including Argos, Asos, Microsoft and Tesco, Honey cycles through available coupons when you hit a checkout and applies matching codes automatically, so you can make savings with less effort. Honey, which is owned by PayPal, claims its internal data shows users enjoy average discounts of 17.9% and average savings of £102 a year.
HTTPS Everywhere
HTTPS Everywhere makes sure that wherever there are secure and insecure connections to a site, your browser opts for the former. It can’t create secure connections where a server hasn’t made such an option available, but if a page mixes secure and insecure links, it will rewrite the insecure options where it know s there are better alternatives. It’s an installand-forget security tool: our favourite kind.
Office Online
If you live each working day inside Microsoft Office, the official extension for Chrome will give you direct access to online Office apps, and your recent documents, for picking up where you left off through the browser. Impressively, your recent files don’t need to be stored in the cloud to be accessible.
The fact that websites use cookies and other technologies not only to manage features within their own domain but to also track you on the web isn’t news. One way around this is to quarantine the nosiest sites in private browsing windows, or by using a separate browser for certain activities, such as social networking.
Mozilla has a neater solution: Multi-Account Containers, which separates different parts of your online life into “buckets” so cookies deposited in one are inaccessible to sites in any other. You might set up a container for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and so on, which will be separate from a news bucket and a third bucket for webmail. SessionBox ( pcpro.link/321ses) performs a similar job on Chromebased browsers and Opera.
Noisli
Silence can be intimidating. Quite a lot of new homeworkers will have discovered that when the lockdown hit. The solution might once have been to head for a coffee shop but… we all know how that story ends. Noisli is designed to produce just enough background noise to stop your mind wandering, with the free plan offering 16 sounds and up to an hour and a half of streaming every day. Pro and business plans at $10 and $24 a month offer progressively more options and a wider variety of sounds. As well as the Chrome extension, there are apps for iOS and Android.
Print Friendly & PDF
You can waste a lot of paper and ink on ads and page design when all you want to print is the body of a web page. The same is true when saving a PDF. You might not want a writer’s whole back story when all you need is their method for baking a foolproof sponge. Enter Print Friendly & PDF, which introduces an interim step between screen and paper (or screen and PDF), allowing you to remove all the chunks of a page you don’t need, and save or print what remains. The result is far more usable, cheaper to print and better for the planet.
Pushbullet
Integrate your phone and your desktop browser using Pushbullet, and you can control your mobile
device from your computer. Send and read texts from your browser, share files and keep an eye on your mobile notifications from your computer. Setup is easy, requiring only the extension on your desktop or laptop browser, the accompanying app on your Android device or iPhone and a Google or Facebook account to log in.
Save to Pocket
No time to read the whole web in one sitting? Save it to Pocket and read it when you’re less busy. There are Pocket reading apps for both Android and iOS, but our preferred medium is an E Ink Kobo e-reader with a built-in Pocket app, allowing us to read in bed without worrying about blue light disrupting our sleep cycles. Head to
pcpro.link/321pok for more info about Pocket on Kobo devices. Also consider installing the OneNote Web Clipper browser extension ( onenote.
com/clipper) if you habitually use OneNote as a web-based scrapbook.
Send to Kindle
While we stand by our endorsement of Pocket, there’s currently no way to read your Pocket articles on an E Ink Kindle. However, Amazon’s official Send to Kindle extension for Chrome will send web content directly to your device in a similar way. The official add-on for Firefox has disappeared, but the third-party Push to Kindle for Firefox ( pcpro.link/321psf) and Edge ( pcpro.link/321pse) performs a similar function.
StayFocusd
StayFocusd forces you to do exactly what its name suggests by blocking sites that distract you for a specified period. You can pick from a list and, as everyone’s tastes are un ique, add your own particular go -tos. So, you could just as easily block the news as you would social media. You could even use it to block work webmail outside of hours if you use the same co mputer in your home and work life.
Todoist
Todoist is a task manager that runs on phones and tablets, computers, wearables and, as we’re including it in this list, browsers. There are dozens of task managers to choose from, but Todoist’s flexibility puts it head and shoulders above many of its rivals, and integration with Alexa and Google Assistant makes it a great tool for managing your shopping lists by voice (just remember that when you tick off an item in Todoist it will still be on the Alexa shopping list, so clear that out separately – you can do so by voice).
Turn Off the Lights
Whether you’re watching YouTub e, Netflix, Vimeo or HTML5 vide o, Turn Off the Lights dims the surr ounding web page with a single click so you can focus on the medi a without being distracted. You ca n control the movie’s soundtrack volume using a mouse scroll wheel, and it also has an Atmosphere Lighting option, which creates ambient light around the vide o player window, just like some physical TVs do in the real world.
Zoom Scheduler
Zoom is the tool that got a lot of us through the last 12 months. Whether you’re setting up a job interview or a Saturday night quiz, finding a mutually acceptable slot can take some backwards-and-forwards by email or text – unless you’re using Zoom Scheduler, which lets you book video conferences directly within Google Calendar. Invitations are sent straight from the calendar to invitees, so they can join with a single click.