Useful Chrome Extensions For Professional Bloggers

Lists of recommended browser extensions age worse than almost any other kind of advice. Extensions get abandoned, sold, or quietly repurposed after being sold, and the list that was useful three years ago is now a security briefing. So rather than name a set that will be wrong again shortly, this covers the categories worth having, and how to judge any candidate before installing it.

A worked example of the problem sits in this article’s own history: the previous version’s top recommendation was the Alexa Toolbar. Amazon retired Alexa entirely in 2022, so that recommendation now points at nothing. It also repeated a claim worth correcting — that installing the toolbar would improve your own Alexa ranking. That was true in a sense, and it is precisely why the metric was unreliable: the ranking was built from the browsing of people who had installed the toolbar, so sites whose owners installed it measured better without being more popular.

The categories that actually earn a slot

Notice what is missing: metric toolbars. Anything displaying an authority score, a domain rating or a traffic estimate on every page you visit is showing you a vendor’s model, not a measurement, and it costs you a permanent observer of your browsing in exchange.

The risk nobody mentions when recommending extensions

An extension with permission to read and change data on all sites can see every page you open, including your email, your dashboard and your bank. That permission is granted once, on install, and it persists silently through every update afterwards.

The failure mode is not usually a malicious developer at the outset. It is acquisition. A useful extension with a large install base is a valuable asset, and there is an established market in buying them. The new owner pushes an update, the update arrives automatically, and an extension that formerly did one honest job begins injecting affiliate parameters, harvesting browsing history, or worse. Nothing on your screen changes.

This is why fewer extensions is a defensible strategy on its own, and why a tool you use twice a year should not be resident permanently.

How to judge one before installing

Read the permissions, and be suspicious of breadth. A screenshot tool needing access to all your data on all websites deserves an explanation. Where the browser offers it, restrict an extension to running only on specific sites, or only when you click it.

Check when it was last updated. An extension untouched for years is either finished or abandoned, and you cannot tell which from the listing.

Ignore the star rating; read the recent one-star reviews. Ratings accumulate over years and are dominated by the version that was good. Recent negative reviews are where an ownership change shows up first.

Find out who publishes it. A named company with a website and a privacy policy is a different proposition from an anonymous developer account.

Prefer the browser’s own features where they exist. Reading mode, capture tools and developer tools now cover a good deal of what extensions were once needed for.

Audit what you already have

Open your browser’s extensions page and go through the list properly. Remove anything you do not recognise or have not used this year — that alone usually clears half of it. For each survivor, look at its permissions and ask whether the job it does justifies them. Then check the update dates, since a long-abandoned extension is a standing risk rather than a stable one.

Doing this twice a year takes ten minutes and is more valuable than any single extension you could install.

Frequently asked questions

Are browser extensions safe?

Individually they can be. The category risk is that a well-behaved extension can change hands and be updated into something else, using permissions you granted years earlier.

Why is the Alexa Toolbar no longer recommended?

Because Amazon retired Alexa in 2022. The service, the rankings and the toolbar are all gone, so any list still recommending it has not been reviewed in years.

How many extensions should I have?

As few as do real work. Every additional one is another permission grant and another future update you will not read.

Do extensions slow down the browser?

Some do noticeably, particularly those that run on every page. If your browser feels slow, disabling extensions in batches identifies the cause quickly.

What does “read and change all your data on all websites” actually allow?

Exactly what it says: the extension can see and alter any page you open, including logged-in ones. Grant it only where the function genuinely requires it.

Are paid extensions safer than free ones?

Not inherently, but a clear business model is a good sign. An extension with no visible way of making money is being paid somehow, and often it is by data.

Related reading

See also how to protect yourself from cybersecurity threats and why free website metrics are unreliable.

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