My Favorite Chrome Extensions

This is a guest post from Sharon Hurley Hall. She’s a writing consultant and professional blogger. Find more of her work on Get Paid To Write Online, Blogging Tips and the Location Independent network of sites. Follow Sharon on Twitter.

Sharon Hurley Hall

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I love Google Chrome which became my browser of choice once the Firefox bloat became too much to bear.  Once Chrome got extension support, my happiness was complete, and I’d like to share with you the extensions that make my life much easier.

Feedly

Top of the list of extensions I use every day is Feedly, which was the extension I missed most when I transitioned from Firefox to Chrome. Feedly puts a magazine like interface on your Google Reader subscriptions and once you sign in with your Google Account, it needs very little customization. I only ever use the native Google Reader interface for adding subscriptions; otherwise I just use Feedly.

Among it’s useful features are:

• an unread notification in the browser bar
• the ability to share  items on Buzz with one click
• the ability to share with comments quickly on Twitter and Facebook
• in-line post reading

There’s a lot more, too, such as seeing how your tweets have been shared.

IE Tab

Next on my list is IE Tab.  I really don’t like Internet Explorer, but some sites still run better in it, so I use IETab to avoid having to load IE separately. It works pretty well and it’s an extension I use a couple of times a week. It’s also useful for when you need to have two instances of the same site open, though a Chrome incognito window works just as well.

Rapportive

Rapportive is a CRM extension that puts social networking information about my contacts right in my Gmail window. I love the fact that I can easily see if my contacts have Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, as well as their most recent tweets. While Gist for Google Apps offers similar functionality, Rapportive doesn’t slow down my email load times and gives only the most relevant information.

Nested Twitter Replies

Nested Twitter Replies is a Greasemonkey script which improves Twitter by giving you an easy view of Twitter conversations. Of course, there are plenty of Twitter tools that do this too, but it’s useful for the times when you are using the main Twitter interface and need to track what’s being said. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help you with replying to the tweets that originated the conversation. You will still have to click on that separately; but it works well as a viewing tool.

View Thru

View Thru also works with Twitter and other sites and allows you to see the full URL instead of shortened URLs.

Wise Stamp

I love WiseStamp because it provides an easy way to insert HTML signatures in Gmail and Google Apps. It has a number of built in options, making it simple to link to your key social media and social networking accounts. I now have a synced signature for all my email and can change it with a single click.

StumbleUpon

Last but not least is the StumbleUpon extension which has restored my beloved StumbleUpon toolbar. There’s not much more to say about this, other than that I can stumble and share content simply by clicking a button.

Other Extensions

Those are 7 of the 12 extensions I have installed. I also occasionally use FastestChrome (a FasterFox port, I believe), though the only feature that interests me is the endless scrolling;  Clip to Evernote, for storing pages that interest me; Readability, to make pages easier to read; Chrome SEO, for an easy way to find SEO data for any page; and Readness, which keeps track of the news sources I read. I’m testing Readness, and am not sure yet if I will keep it.

So that’s my grab bag of Chrome extensions; what’s in yours?

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