Ever since Google Chrome was launched two years back, it has received love from internet users in a way no other browser ever received. One of the prime reasons for this is the presence of numerous extensions that takes the browsing to the next level. However because of so many extensions, users at time feel at loss in selecting the right extension for their requirement.
At Devils Workshop we have tried to do our bit in removing this confusion by coming up with posts like
5 Chrome Extensions To Enhance your Google Search Experience
5 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Designers
3 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Developers
This time Google has decided to help the users in selecting the right extension by coming up with its list of favorite extensions.
Chrome team has listed down their 19 favorite extensions in the official Google blog, which are:
- Opinion Cloud: Summarizes comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos to provide an overview of the crowd’s overall opinion. This comes in handy if a video or photo has hundreds of comments and you want to know what others think about it. Instead of going through each and every comment, with the help of opinion cloud you can find the general consensus.
- Google Voice: Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Voice inbox and gives you quick access to your most recent messages with transcripts and voicemail playback. It works only in US.
- AutoPager. If you are reading an article that is spread across several pages, you no longer have to click Next to continue reading. AutoPager automatically loads the next page of a site as you scroll down.
- Turn Off the Lights: Fades the page to improve the video/image watching experience. It supports several videos like YouTube, HTML5, and also work with Picasa, Google Image Search etc.
- Google Dictionary: Double-click any word on a web page to see its definition.
- After the Deadline: Checks spelling, style, and grammar on your emails, blog, tweets, etc.
- Invisible Hand: Does a quick price check and lets you know if the product you are looking at is available at a lower price at some other store. It currently supports retailers in US, UK and Germany, with Canada soon to follow.
- Secbrowsing: Periodically checks that all your plug-ins are up to date.
- Tineye: This is an image search utility which helps to find exact matches (including cropped, edited, or re-sized images) of an image. So you can find who is using the images from your blog.
- Slideshow: Turns photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Google Images into slideshows.
- Google Docs/PDF Viewer: Automatically previews pdfs, powerpoint presentations, and other documents in Google Docs Viewer.
- Readability: Reformat the page into a single column of text by removing sidebars, thus enhancing readability.
- Chromed Bird: A nice Twitter client extension that lets you see all your tweets, follow timelines, reply and retweet.
- Feedsquares: Cool way of viewing your feeds via Google Reader.
- ScribeFire: This is a full-featured blog editor that lets you easily post to any of your blogs.
- Note Anywhere: Digital post-it notes that can be pasted and saved on any webpage. When you go to that page again, the notes get loaded automatically.
- Instant Messaging Notifier: Get IM on multiple clients which includes MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Skype and Facebook.
- Remember the Milk: To-do application from popular Remember the Milk. It lets you manage tasks directly from Chrome.
- Extension.fm: ExtensionFM turns the web into your personal music library. It indexes every music file that you come across while browsing and builds a music library for you.
The above list consists of extensions for almost all possible scenarios. There might be many other extensions with similar features but being endorsed officially by Chrome team talks about their quality and also makes it easy for the users to find them.
My personal favorite from this list is NoteAnywhere, After the Deadline and Remember the Milk. We have reviewed Remember the Milk in past which you can check here.
Which of the above extensions do you like? Can you think of some other extension that Google might have missed?