Extend yourself: the smart

WHEN it come to our online habits, we all have good intentions. We fully intended to read that op-ed on ethical fashion even though it’s been in our bookmark folder for a month now. But if you knew that it would only take six minutes to learn about sustainable trousers you’d be much more likely to read it there and then.

Read Time is a Google Chrome extension that will do this for you and it’s just one of the ways we are customising our web experience with add-ons. It automatically tells you if an article is a five-minute read or a settle-in-with-a-cup-of-tea marathon. A little widget pops up in the corner of your Chrome browser and you can adjust your average reading time if you’re a fast or slow reader.

If you have a procrastinationprevention app on your phone but are still Facebook-stalking on your laptop, you need to employ some more hardcore methods. The StayFocusd Chrome extension restricts how long you can spend on websites. You decide how long each day you want to spend on a site and then once you’ve used that up it’s blocked until the next day. You can also block video content.

The website StatCounter says that currently almost 60 per cent of internet users use Google Chrome as their preferred browser, with Mozilla Firefox at 14 per cent and Safari languishing around 10 per cent. Chrome is by far the most tailored. Its extensions range from the practical time-savers to light-hearted distraction such as Tabby Cat (right), which