One of the reasons why browsers like Google Chrome and the like consume so much RAM is due to browser extensions. Browsers these days are more than just for internet surfing; they’re also powerful work tools and part of the power comes from browser extensions.
If utilized right, and with the proper selection of these browser extensions, you can boost your productivity and streamline your work process.
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Some of these browser extensions are even so convenient that you might find yourself unable to work in their absence. Try them out and see for yourself. Do note that some of them might not be available outside of Google Chrome’s extension store.
Dark Reader
Do you hate it when certain websites or content management systems burn your retina with the fury of a thousand suns while you’re working in the dark at night? Then here’s a browser extension that forces a customizable Dark Mode for every website you come across.
It’s a godsend for those paper-white websites and back-end UI. As we also stated before, it’s highly customizable and you can even tune the level of black or grey in the Dark Mode as well as toggle the extension for specific websites. There’s also a Sepia mode, contrast slider, and even greyscale for those who want a more personalized and eye-friendly experience.
uBlock Origin
If your work involves a lot of research and browsing, then you’ll surely come across some websites with more ads than actual content– or worse, some websites with ads that contain malware and other viruses. To ensure that your visitations remain as safe as they can be from such ads, uBlock Origin is among the most reliable ad-blockers.
Granted, some honest sites and businesses gain revenue from ads so you’ll want to cherry-pick which ones you’ll allow or activate uBlock Origin with. In any case, even programmers recommend uBlock Origin no matter what the browser is since it’s also available in some of the most popular Google Chrome alternatives.
Writer
Writers and college students will mostly benefit from this browser extension. Grammarly is decent but it misses a lot of words, typos, and punctuations (and it’s also prone to bugs and glitches). So you can use this in combination with Grammarly for a cleaner copy of whatever you’re writing.
With the combination of the two, you might not even need to proofread anymore or simply keep the proofreading to a minimum instead of dealing too much with typos. It’s also free though there’s a premium version if you want to further improve your written copies.
Tab Resize
If you have a big monitor or you simply want to have several browser windows or tabs displayed on one or more screens then the Windows 11 functionality is a godsend. But there are people who still abhor Windows 11 which is understandable given its myriad of bugs and hidden performance obstructions.
For those using Windows 10 or below, the Tab Resize browser extension works similarly though with less elegance. That is assuming your browser doesn’t have this kind of tab-resizing and splitting functionality. It’s not perfect or seamless, but it’s the best preferable to reluctantly upgrading to Windows 11.
Timewarp
If you find yourself often drifting away to social media or your favorite distractions on the web, Timewarp will guide you back to the right path. It’s not a stressful slavemaster of an extension, don’t worry. Timewarp handles its policing more empathically.
Sometimes it will redirect you to a more productive website if you’ve been led astray by the cult of social media, other times, it will show you a timer of how long you’ve been on a non-productive website.
Wordtune
It’s a good time to be alive for writers, students, email assistants, and researchers because AI for writing exists and it’s not smart enough to take over everyone’s job– not yet. It is, however, smart enough to help people improve their writing or sentences. Extensions like Wordtune are great for such a use case. It won’t finish your writing for you, take note.
Of course, if your text is already decent and quirky as per today’s standards, it won’t give you many suggestions (if any at all). But for those learning to write efficiently and are just starting out, Wordtune is one of the handiest writing tools. It also helps writers dealing with writer’s block or an abnormally rare lack of caffeine in their blood.
Raindrop
Most bookmark managers– even the one from Chrome, are sub-par and unfriendly once you have bookmarked too many sites. Extensions like Raindrop offer a more user-friendly approach to how you save some noteworthy or crucial information you might find and need for later.
In addition to being a thoughtful bookmark manager, Raindrop also doubles as a saving extension. It lets you save videos, images, and even audio for your perusal or work later. Its most important feature for researchers is the indexing of all the bookmarked web pages; it lets users search for the exact words and content that they’ve saved.
Checker Plus
For people who expect a heavy and frequent flow of emails on a daily basis, Checker Plus is a great tool for efficiency. This browser extension will send you notifications from Gmail without having to open the website.
Apart from that, it will also let you compose or reply to said emails without changing tabs, like how the Gmail chat notification or popup works, except you, don’t have to open Gmail. With this, your workflow will be disrupted a lot less.
Cite This For Me
This one will likely become an instant favorite for anyone dealing with academic research. It’s an automatic citation tool that can format your citations in APA, Chicago, or MLA, (Harvard citation is sadly not available yet).
It goes without saying that there are limitations. But the tool is easy enough to use, just click on the information on the web page which you want to be cited and the extension will create the citation for you. All that’s left to do is copy and paste the correct format.
OneTab
One of the reasons why browsers keep crashing even on the standard 16 GB of RAM is how several open tabs consume too much processor and memory. An extension like OneTab might be warranted, especially if you like to use other applications on top of a browser with 30 tabs open.
But it’s not just for saving memory. OneTab reorganizes those tabs into a list that you can restore individually or all at once. It’s thus easier to determine which is which, for example, because they’re no longer compressed if too many tabs are open; now you can keep tabs on your tabs (oh no a dad joke; sue me, whatever, I regret nothing!).
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