I've spent years collecting a number of great extensions which have turned Google Chrome into my indispensable browser.

Despite its flaws, Google Chrome has been my primary web browser for some time. It’s not because I think Chrome is great. Quite the contrary, it is slow and bloated. And worse, it probably sends all the sites I visit to Google to help them target me with advertising. But I keep coming back over and over again due to some of the great extensions that don’t exist for Safari. (And don’t get me started on why I don’t use Firefox…)

You can download the extensions on my list or search for your own at the Chrome Web Store.

Enhancements to native functionality

  • Currently: Enhances the default new tab screen with time and weather.
  • History Timeline: Provides a visual timeline of all the web sites you’ve visited.
  • HTTPS Everywhere: Automatically switches thousands of sites from insecure “http” to secure “https” giving you piece of mind.
  • OneTab: Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.
  • Simple Extension Manager: An extension manager that allows you to easily enable/disable them at will.
  • SliceURL: My favorite link shortener extension. It works with many link shortening services, looks great, and lets you generate QR codes.

Privacy

  • Ghostery: Ghostery sees the “invisible” web, detecting trackers, web bugs, pixels, and beacons placed on web pages by hundreds of companies. Then you can learn more and/or block these scripts at will.
  • Clear Cache: Quickly clear your cache with this extension without any confirmation dialogs, pop-ups or other annoyances.
  • Cookie Manager: The extension is a little on the geeky side. It lets you search, view, edit, add, and erase any cookies on your computer.
  • Forget Me: Delete everything about a website with a single click. Cookies, History, localStorage, sessionStorage…everything

Images

  • Hover Zoom: Move the mouse cursor over thumbnails to view images in their full size without loading a new page.
  • TinEye Reverse Image Search: TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.
  • Webpage Screenshot: This extension is able to capture 100% of both the vertical and horizontal content appearing on any web page on the Internet.
  • Search By Image: Google’s own extension to let you initiate an image search from any image in your browser.

Web Development

  • Google Analytics Debugger: Prints useful information to the JavaScript console by enabling the debug version of the Google Analytics Javascript.
  • Magic Inputs Filler: Extension allows you to fill all the inputs, text areas and selects on the page with random values depending on it’s type. Great for automated QA.
  • Responsive Inspector: Allows you to view the responsive media queries in a site’s CSS with a nifty visual inspector.
  • Speed Tracer: Speed Tracer is a tool made by Google to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs.
  • Web Developer: Adds a tool bar button to the browser with various web developer tools. This is the Swiss Army Knife of developer extensions.
  • Window Resizer: This extension re-sizes the browser’s window in order to emulate various resolutions. It is particularly useful for web designers and developers by helping them test their layouts on different browser resolutions.

SEO

  • MozBar: This toolbar from Moz lets you create custom searches, compare link metrics, highlight links and keywords, quickly expose page elements, and access other powerful SEO tools.
  • PageRank Status: Shows Google PageRank and AlexaRank of current web page, quick access to Geo IP Location, Whois, Alexa, back links and indexed pages.
  • seo & website analysis: SEO & Website Analysis by WooRank provides a deep SEO analysis covering SEO, Mobile, Local and Usability.

Did I miss any great extensions? Let me know in the comments.