Google Chrome is the most used web browser; more than 50% of internet users use Chrome (according to W3Schools). Apart from the amazing user experience it offers, Google has made sure that it can be modified as per the user’s wish. For that, Google has provided chrome users a webstore. Everybody has their own preferences and the wide variety of apps and extensions on the Chrome Webstore caters to exactly that.

Being a regular internet user for almost five years now, I have spent time choosing apps that would best suit me. Here is a list of the apps and extensions that I like.

  1. Adblock

Adblock is by far my favorite app on any browser. It works perfectly, blocking ads as I go surfing the web which makes my browsing experience much more annoyance-free. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend this to you. It always shows up in reviews like ‘Top 10 Chrome Extensions’, so it has to be good. There is a good alternative to this called Adblock Plus, which may actually be more popular than this. I have tried that one too, but I was not sure how to compare the two, I mean they (just) block ads, what is to compare? Well anyway, kudos to a fantastic idea and implementation.

  1. Facebook Unsee

A nice little extension that gives you anonymity on Facebook chat. It makes sure that the person or the group you are chatting with does not know whether you have read the messages sent to you. Basically, it blocks the response sent from your computer which tells the server that you have ‘Seen’ the messages sent to you. I had installed it a long time ago, and I don’t even know if the developer keeps it updated. But it works, so I won’t be switching over to any other extension any time soon.

  1. Google Dictionary

A pretty handy app that is useful while browsing. Just double click on a word it to select it, and a tooltip will appear with a definition of the selected word. A nice feature that it has is that you can even look for the meaning of a word in the definition that is showed in the tooltip. If you want to look more definitions, just click on the extension’s icon on the top-right corner after you have selected a word. If even that doesn’t satisfy you, it links you to a  Google search of the word.

  1. Photo Zoom for Facebook

This extension should win an award! It is greatly useful while on Facebook. What it does is, it enlarges any picture (it may be a profile picture too!) that your cursor hovers on, so you don’t have to click on a picture to look at its finer details. Simply amazing in terms of both the idea and implementation. This one extension can redefine your Facebooking experience.

  1. Speed Dial 2

Nice interface, but its a little heavy. But now, since Chrome always runs in the background that isn’t an issue. It takes screenshots of the websites shown in the dial on its own. Another cool feature is that it can show your browsing history in the form of a pie chart which shows how many visits you have had to a certain website to sites that you normally visit. What disappointed me was the way the bookmark menu was shown. Same with the Chrome apps menu. They should have done something else, honestly. I haven’t really bothered searching for alternatives to a Speed Dial extension because I rarely use bookmarks and much less the apps.