Chrome: Twitter is a great source for news, articles and keeping up with friends, but it’s also sometimes a magnet for people obsessed with some annoying celebrity that you have no desire to read about. Purge Twitter Trends is a Chrome extension that strips specific celebrity trending topics from your feed so you can read in peace without being forced to unfollow them.
Chrome: If Chrome’s built-in new tab page looks a little plain to you, or if you like the look of Microsoft’s Metro UI, MySites is a Chrome extension that changes the new tab page into a start page decorated with a search bar and tiles that take you straight to your favourite sites.
Whatever you use private browsing for, sometimes you want to start your secret browsing from the page you’re already on. “Incognito This” moves your current page to a new incognito window, so you can continue browsing privately without starting from scratch.
Chrome: Tab Grouper is a simple extension that does one thing: groups all your tabs from the same site together, so you don’t have to go searching through your tab bar to find the right one.
Chrome: Even when you organise your bookmarks neatly into folders and subfolders, if you’ve got a ton of bookmarks, they can be hard to access quickly — and easy to forget about. Stashmarks solves this problem by indexing your bookmarks and making them searchable.
Gmail is Google’s golden child, but it isn’t perfect. It’s full of numerous user interface elements you don’t necessarily want or need, and there’s no way to turn them off. Gmelius offers you a way out of ads, the people bar and more while also making Gmail easier to navigate. It’s a great extension, it’s free, and it can dramatically improve your experience in less than a minute.
This extension adds favicons — those little icons you see in your address bar when you visit a page — to Google’s search results so you can more easily see what site each link is coming from.
Kill Evil is a simple extension that disables annoying scrips all across the web, like sites that won’t let you right-click, sites that won’t let you copy images, or sites that paste in citation links whenever you copy their text.
Chrome: Most of us still use RSS regularly, but one potential annoyance is an RSS feed that truncates the article for the purpose of getting you to click the link and leave your RSS reader. Google Reader Inline is a Chrome Extension that lets you read the full article without leaving Google Reader to do it.
Despite the increase in the variety of ways you can consume media and learn about news, Google Reader is still the default news reader for many. While you can always find a good desktop RSS reader to suit your needs, many people still prefer the plain old web experience. Just because you prefer the web app doesn’t mean you can’t overhaul the look and feel though, so let’s take a look at some of the best extensions, styles and tweaks you can use to make the experience better.
