Google Chrome Extensions: Part Three – General Browsing

So far in this series of posts about extensions for Google’s Chrome, I’ve told you about entertainment-themed add-ons, and suggested a selection for bloggers. Today’s post covers useful extensions that help to make browsing a little bit easier or more interesting. The following list contains my personal favourites but it’s not definitive, so feel free to share suggestions in the comments!

Daily Links - This is the Chrome equivalent of Firefox’s Morning Coffee, and a great way of accessing all the pages you use on a regular basis. Add your favourite sites, then open them up with one click. You can change the settings to determine which days you load each site, and whether it loads in a new window or the existing one.

Feedly – A feed-reader extension, that works in conjunction with Google Reader. Feedly has a really attractive magazine-style layout, and offers you a choice of reading a digest of your favourite blogs, or catching up with the latest updates. You can read by category, subscribe to new blogs using the list of related blogs, and synchronise with Google Reader – this means that when you read or subscribe in Feedly, it will update Google Reader automatically. You can also use the Twitter tool to keep up with tweets, or share links with your followers.

Monkeyfly - A nifty little add-on that adds extra columns to your Twitter page. So, when you log in, instead of just seeing a page of the latest tweets, you can add a panel to show @replies, or tweets from one of your lists. This might not work too well if you have a smaller monitor, but otherwise is a great way of turning the main Twitter site into a Twitter client without needing to download extra software.

StumbleUpon – A version of the SU toolbar is now available for Chrome. It doesn’t have all the features of the Firefox/Internet Explorer versions, but that is being worked on. However, it does let you stumble, like, share and review pages.

Google Mail Checker – Simple little extension that tells you how many emails you have, and lets you access your inbox at the click of a button.

Xmarks Bookmarks Sync – Synchronises your bookmarks across different browsers and computers. This is really useful if you use different computers at work and at home, or if you have more than one machine for performing different tasks.