8 Chrome extensions I can’t live without

One of the greatest things about modern browsers like Chrome is the support for extensions that add extra functionality that goes well beyond the standard features you’d expect from a browser.

While Chrome extensions are technically designed with Google’s browser in mind, you’ll find many modern browsers support extensions, including Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera. In fact, any browser based on the Chromium standard will work. 

Personally, I can’t imagine using Chrome without my favorite extensions onboard. Whether it’s storing passwords or forcing dark mode across my entire web experience, below are eight of the extensions I rely on regularly to make the most of my browsing experience.

One Tab

I love tabs and can’t imagine returning to the early days of the internet before they were a thing. The downside is that it’s easy for tabs to get out of hand in a hurry. Not only can it get so messy that it’s impossible to tell what’s what, but tabs are also a massive drain on RAM usage and can slow down even the most powerful machines.

That’s where One Tab comes in handy. While I previously used the Tab.Ninja, I found OneTab to require less initial setup and tinkering.

One Tab cannot only save groups of tabs long-term, but you can also create named categories, so that you can quickly swap between work mode and play mode, so to speak. When I’m looking into banking and financing, I might have one set of tabs. Working freelance uses another, and so on.

Grammarly

Grammarly isn’t for everyone, but it’s absolutely instrumental if you work in an environment like mine. Not only do I use Grammarly on a daily basis to check my own articles, but I also use it for sending out email communications, improving notes, and so much more.

Grammarly is way more than just a spellcheck program; it also checks grammar and helps you correct mistakes with relative ease. While the free version is already more than capable for basic use, I personally have the Pro tier.

The Pro version adds generative AI and other improvements that can take your writing level to the next level. That said, the free tier should be more than good enough for those with more basic needs.

Dark Reader

As someone who spends a lot of time on a computer, I find dark mode helps reduce eye strain. While Chrome already has a dark mode available to users, the catch is that not all websites actually support it.

The good news is that Dark Reader works around Chrome’s current limitations, bringing users a handy menu system that makes it easy to enable dark mode on virtually any website. You can even customize the brightness, contrast, grayscale, and more.

The only potential downside is that sometimes sites will get stuck in Dark Mode, even if you shut off the Dark Reader tool. Thankfully, fixing it is as easy as refreshing the page in this situation.

Bitwarden Password Manager

For years, I used LastPass to manage my passwords both personally and professionally. After 2022, the company suffered from a major security breach, and combined with high pricing, I decided it was time to look for an alternative. After trying Dashlane and a few others, I ultimately settled for Bitwarden.

While you don’t technically have to use a Chrome extension with Bitwarden, it makes life much easier and lets you quickly fill in and save passwords on the fly. Unlike most other options, it’s also free and open source. It’s arguably not as feature-packed as some of its competitors, but the lack of a price tag and an easy-to-use interface make it hard for me to consider any other alternative at this point.

If you’re not already using a password manager in 2026, I really recommend you do. With the rise of data breaches and other scams, it’s no longer wise (and really never was) to recycle the same or just a few passwords across multiple services. This ensures everything you log into has a unique password, and yet you don’t have to directly remember them all.

Scribe

As someone in tech journalism, I often find myself writing how-tos, step-by-step guides, and features about my own experiences. Scribe makes some of this easier than ever, as it can automatically convert whatever I’m doing into step-by-step guides.

While I don’t actually use this in my written work, it’s a good way to keep a record of what I did and what steps I took for when it comes time to turn it into something more. It’s extremely easy to use Scribe, and while it’s not for everyone, almost everyone in a professional setting could benefit, even if it’s just to keep track of the steps it takes to do certain tasks for later reference or for training others.

View Image Button

Google removed the ability to view images directly from search results years ago, partly to prevent image theft. Even so, there are times when you just want a clean, high-resolution look at an image without jumping through hoops.

If I want to show my kids a game character or a screenshot from a childhood show, pulling up a full-screen image is far simpler than clicking through to a site and hoping the image is even still there. View Image Button does exactly that.

It occasionally has hiccups, but there’s really no better alternative anymore since the older, once-popular View Image extension stopped working correctly ages ago.

Sider

If you want the latest AI chatbots integrated directly into Chrome, there are plenty of options, but Sider stands out by putting ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Claude, and Grok all in one place. For my entirely web-based workflow, having all these chatbots a click away has proven more useful than I expected.

Paid plans start at $8.30 a month, which covers basic use with a modest credit allocation across three tiers: Basic, Advanced, and Elite. Basic supports lighter models like Sider Fusion and GPT-5 Mini, Advanced unlocks more capable ones like GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Elite adds deep research and image generation.

For heavier use, the Plus plan at $24.90 a month gives you unlimited Basic and Advanced credits with 250 Elite credits. There’s also an Ultra tier at $133.30, though that’s aimed at specific professional use cases.

Ublock Origin Lite

For years, I refused to use ad-blockers in order to support smaller websites and other entities that rely on them. While I still often disable blockers, the internet has become even more ad-crowded in the last few years, and so I turned to UBlock Origin Lite as the solution.

Ublock Origin Lite is free and open source, has an easy-to-install extension, and blocks multiple types of ads and trackers. That said, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s nowhere near as powerful or effective atabs Ublock Origin.

Unfortunately, Google no longer actively supports the full Origin blocker, but this is still a reasonably decent alternative.