Five ChromeOS Extensions I Wouldn't Want to Live Without

Yes, I am going to become a "listicle" terror. Blame Thane.

As a user of (almost exclusively) Chromebooks and Chromeboxes since 2012, I've used quite a few extensions. Some I've discarded or at least disabled. Others make my life better and/or easier and I'd hate not to have them. Here (in no particular order) are five of the latter kind.

The Great Suspender -- This extension "suspends" tabs that haven't been visited for a certain (user-set) amount of time to cut back on memory usage. You can whitelist sites that you never want suspended, and when you go back to a suspended tab, you can click on a link and reload the web site that was running in that tab. The Great Suspender was my first solution to the slowdown phenomenon that comes with running lots of browser tabs on a machine with only 2Gb of RAM (my Asus M004U Chromebox, which I upgraded to 4Gb last week), and it helped. A lot.

uBlock Origin -- Yes, I finally went over to the dark side and started using an ad blocker, for the same reason I use The Great Suspender. That is, to not have my RAM eaten up by a bunch of extraneous crap. Yes, I still feel guilty sometimes. No, not really. uBlock Origin was the extension I settled on after trying several, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

Keep Awake -- The Chromebox doesn't come with user-adjustable power management settings. You can get around that by going to command line in Chrome Shell ("crosh") and directly editing crap. But then you'd have to remember what you edited and how if you wanted to change or undo it. Keep Awake gives you three convenient settings to switch between with a click. Normal (after a certain amount of time, the machine goes into sleep mode and the displays go dark), a setting that keeps the system awake (and doing stuff if you have something running) even when the displays shut down, and a setting that doesn't even let the displays shut down. When I have the Chromebox web mining cryptocurrency overnight while I sleep, I use that middle setting.

Screen Shader --  A Chrome extension take on f.lux, a program that adjusts the color tone of your computer screen to "to decrease eye-strain, eye fatigue and to appease your brain's day/night cycle." I've only recently started using it, but it feels easier on the eyes. I suppose I might come back later and deprecate it. But I doubt it.

File System for Dropbox -- On most operating systems, if you want to use Dropbox you install some software that creates a Dropbox folder where you save the stuff you want synchronized/backed up to cloud storage. ChromeOS isn't most operating systems. Until this extension came along, if I wanted to store a file in Dropbox I had to go to the web site, log in, and upload the file. File System for Dropbox appears in my file manager as an additional drive, and acts like one. I can save to it, load from it, copy files to and from it, etc.

Google +1 WTF

I've not been using Google +1 very much, or for very long, but I just ran into something I haven't seen before: "Cannot +1 this page."


That's using my Google +1 Chrome extension button, which sits next to my address bar so that I don't have to look around for a button actually on whatever page I'm reading and want to bump that way.

As it happens, there's a +1 button on the page in question, and it worked. But I'm wondering why the extension didn't.

Four Chrome Tools for Bloggers

Image via WikipediaI write this post advisedly, knowing that each blogger has a different style, different needs, and different tolerance for different gizmos. Over the years I've test-driven various apps and add-ons, and frankly most of them are more trouble than they're worth. Here are four -- formatted, not necessarily exclusively, as Chrome extensions or apps -- that I'm finding useful now that I do most of my web work in Chrome.

Zemanta


Third party blog editors are usually a pain in the keister. I've tried editors like ScribeFire and always end up abandoning them, not least because I use customized fields, etc. in WordPress over at Rational Review News Digest.  Zemanta isn't an editor, precisely. It's an add-on that (relatively unobtrusively) improves your default blog post editor (in Blogger and Wordpress, and perhaps others) with several useful tools -- related images, complete with usage/license information, related stories from around the web or from a database of sources you can specify yourself, and so  forth. It's not just for Chrome -- it works with your browser of choice.

My only complaint with Zemanta is that it requires you to use the WYSIWYG editing mode, and I prefer to just hand-code my HTML as I go. Which is why this is the first blog post that I'm doing completely in Zemanta. It takes some getting used to. But it's worth it. I think.

After The Deadline


From the folks at Automattic (the guys who brought us Wordpress!), After the Deadline is an extensive spelling, grammar and composition checker. Invoke it with a (user-configurable) keyboard macro and it finds and highlights not only spelling mistakes but double negatives, passive voice and other writing no-nos that you may or may not want to correct. I don't always take its advice, but I'm always glad to have it. Once again, not Chrome-only, but that's where I use it.

Word and Character Count


Bhagwad Jal Park wrote Word and Character Count -- his first Chrome extension -- specifically so that he could give up Firefox and move to Chrome. And I'm very glad he did! That cool little "W" sitting next to my address bar saves me a trip to wordcounttool.com, and a bunch of of copying and pasting, whenever I'm editing something to length (C4SS op-eds, for example). Indispensable.

NewsSquares


It's still in beta, but Rocket-in-Bottle's NewsSquares is already changing the way I keep up with news and commentary sources for fun and profit -- at RRND, here at KN@PPSTER, and just in general.

Instead of folders full of bookmarks to open in tabs, I've got a screen (launched as a Chrome app) full of little squares, one per site I need to keep up with. Each square has a number representing the unread articles since my last visit. Click on the square and the article titles scroll across the bottom of my screen so that I can click'em, check'em out in summary, and launch the ones that bear further inspection in new tabs.

It isn't perfect -- some sites don't play well with it, presumably due to its reliance on RSS and integration with Google Reader -- but it's definitely a time-saver. I get to spend more time reading and less time finding things to read.