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 additional functionality that goes beyond the standard features you’ve come to expect from a browser.

While Chrome extensions are technically designed with Google’s browser in mind, you’ll find many modern browser 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. Whether it’s storing passwords or enforcing dark mode on my entire web experience, below are eight extensions that I regularly rely on to get the most of my browsing experience.

I love tabs and can’t imagine returning to the early days of the Internet, when they existed. The downside is that it’s easy for tabs to get out of control in a hurry. Not only can it get so messy that it’s impossible to tell what’s what, but tabs also take up a lot of RAM usage and can slow down even the most powerful machines.

This is where One Tab comes in handy. While I used it before tab.ninjaI found that OneTab requires less initial setup and tinkering.

Not only can a tab save groups of tabs long-term, but you can also create named categories, so you can quickly swap between work mode and play mode, so to speak. When I’m looking at banking and financing, I may have a set of tabs. Others are used for freelance work, etc.

Grammarly isn’t for everyone, but if you work in an environment like mine it’s absolutely vital. Not only do I use Grammarly on a daily basis to proofread my own articles, but I also use it to send email communications, improve notes, and more.

Grammarly is more than just a spell checking program; It also checks grammar and helps you correct mistakes easily. While the free version is already more capable for basic use, I personally have the Pro level.

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

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

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

The only potential downside is that sometimes sites will get stuck in dark mode, even if you turn off the dark reader tool. Thankfully, the fix in this situation is as easy as refreshing the page.

For years, I used LastPass to manage my passwords, both personal and business. After 2022, the company suffered a major security breach, and with the high pricing, I decided it was time to look for alternatives. After trying Dashlane and a few others, I finally settled on Bitwarden.

Although you don’t technically need to use the Chrome extension with Bitwarden, it makes life a lot easier and lets you fill in and save passwords instantly. Unlike most other options, it’s also free and open source. Sure it’s not as feature-packed as some of its competitors, but the lack of price tag and easy-to-use interface make it hard for me to consider any other option at this point.

If you aren’t already using a password manager in 2026, I really recommend you do so. With data breaches and other scams on the rise, it is no longer wise (and really never was) to recycle the same or only a few passwords across multiple services. This ensures that everything you log into has a unique password, and yet you don’t have to remember them all straight away.

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

Although I don’t really use it in my written work, it’s a good way to keep track of what I did and what steps I took when it came time to turn it into something else. Scribe is extremely easy to use, and although it’s not for everyone, almost everyone in a professional setting can benefit from it, whether just to keep track of the steps taken to perform certain tasks for later reference or to train others.

To prevent image theft, Google removed the ability to view images directly from search results years ago. Still, there are times when you want a clean, high-resolution view of an image without any glitches.

If I want to show my kids a screenshot of a sports character or childhood show, it’s far simpler to pull up a full-screen image than to click through to a site and hope that the image is still there. The View Image button does exactly that.

It has its occasional hiccups, but there’s really no better option anymore because the old, once-popular View Image extension stopped working correctly ages ago.

If you want to integrate the latest AI chatbots directly into Chrome, there are plenty of options, but Cider stands out by having ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Cloud, 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 per month, covering basic usage with nominal credit allocations, at three tiers: Basic, Advanced, and Elite. Basic Sider supports lightweight models like Fusion and GPT-5 Mini, Advanced unlocks more capable models like GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Elite adds deeper research and image creation.

For heavy usage, the $24.90 per month Plus plan gives you unlimited Basic and Advanced credits along with 250 Elite credits. There is also an Ultra tier at $133.30, although it is aimed at specific business use cases.

For years, I refused to use ad-blockers in order to support small websites and other entities that rely on them. While I still often disable blockers, the Internet has become even more ad-crowded over the past few years, and so I turned to uBlock Origin Lite as a solution.

uBlock Origin Lite is free and open source, has easy-to-install extensions, and blocks a wide variety of ads and trackers. That said, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s nowhere near as powerful or effective as uBlock Origin.

Unfortunately, Google no longer actively supports full Origin blocking, but it’s still a reasonable option.