When Firefox was released it came as a breath of fresh air – at last there was a real competitor to the dominant player in the browser market, Internet Explorer. People in the tech sector quickly got wind of Firefox and soon it became the default browser for many. Myself included.
I stuck with Firefox for a long time and often struggled with it, while it struggled with the various, and numerous, extensions I had installed. Maybe I was asking too much of Firefox? Maybe it couldn’t cope with all that extra code?
I stripped down the plugins to the essential few.
It still struggled, and when a new player appeared on the market I mutinied. I left the sinking ship and joined the new kid on the block, Goolge Chrome, and I have never looked back.
There have been times when I have revisited Firefox. I had to, because sometimes those plugins make life just that bit easier. SEOBook for instance, or Firebug, or Feedly.
I didn’t want to go down the same route with Google Chrome. I didn’t want a cumbersome browser that struggles to open and refresh itself when I request a new page. I haven’t got the patience.
So I hadn’t paid much attention to the Google Chrome extensions market, but it looks like it is gathering pace and there are now hundreds of extensions to choose from.
Top of the ‘top rated‘ list is Feedly. I recommend you get that one. When I switched to Chrome it was the one thing I really missed. Feedly is an RSS reader, but it looks nice. It takes the feeds from your Google account and displays them in a pretty magazine like interface, unlike the default reader provided by Google, which is pretty darn ugly.
The second most popular Chrome extension at this time is Robot Theme, inspired by Android. This themes the browser to look like Android. I don’t think I will be installing this one, but if it is for you, check out the user reviews before you install it. One anonymous reviewer said
there is bug, on pages with https. In maximized window mode, there is strange white line above url in omnibox. please fix it..
Not sure if this is a security issue or just a display issue, but something to bear in mind.
Google Mail Checker Plus is next in the top three. This one displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail account.
Fourth on the list is Web Developer. This one you could certainly do with if you are interested in coding/adapting themes or building your site from scratch. There are tons of features that allow you to analyze web pages, check for errors (such as missing alt tags), validate code, check how a page would look in a different resolution and check forms. It is a very handy plugin to have installed – I recommend you get it if code tinkering or web standards are your thing.
The last of the top five is Chromey Calculator, which does exactly what it says it will do, but is another one I won’t be installing as I have a calculator sitting on my desk next to my laptop.
The only other one I would recommend at this time, and this one is mostly for those of you who are interested in the SEO side of blogging, is SEOQuake. It places a toolbar like strip at the top of the browser and shows the following parameters (for the page displayed) by default:
- Google PageRank
- Number of pages indexed in Google
- Yahoo! inbound liks
- Bing inbound links
- Alexa ranking (how accurate is Alexa data)
- Domain age
- Bookmarks in Delicious
- Whois information
- Source code
- SEMRush data
- Keywords density
- Detailed analysis of the links on the page
The great thing about these extensions, and indeed, Chrome, is speed. Everything works instantly. Pages ares loaded very quickly and the data provided by the plugins is available in the blink of any eye.
It looks like I will now be using Firefox much, much less.
If you have any Chrome, or indeed Firefox, extensions you would like to mention, please feel free to do so in the comments section below. I know a lot of people still love Firefox, but, for me, Chrome is just that bit better.
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