We have focused mainly on Google Chrome and Firefox, since these two are the most novelties covered in the year, and are also two of the most used browsers. Anyway, if you use a browser like Opera or Vivaldi, they support extensions of Chrome, as this article is also for you.
Panda
Panda is a smart news reader built with productivity in mind. Although you can use it simply from the web by connecting it to your Twitter account, it has extensions for Chrome and Firefox that further enhance the experience.
With Panda you can browse multiple websites at the same time, personalize your home tab, read in a distraction-free mode, make detailed searches within all your news sources, add content to favorites or read later, and all within An extremely responsive and very well designed interface that you can adjust to your liking.
Privacy Badger
The EFF updated its Privacy Badger extension in late 2016. This small tool allows you to fight against all the crawlers that are following you on the web, recording what you do and learning your habits.
Privacy Badger 2.0 is compatible even with the browser’s private mode, you can import and export your preferences from one browser to another, and has preventative locks to avoid leaks from your IP address. All this while informing you of all active trackers on every web you visit, and automatically blocks them.
Toby
Toby is one of the best things that happened to me this year. It’s a Chrome extension that lets you organize your tabs in Chrome into groups of cards while saving RAM. It’s the ultimate tab manager you’ve been waiting for.
Unfortunately it is only compatible with Chrome, and can only bring its benefits to those users. If you want to solve the nightmare in which you can turn the management of tabs into your browser and quickly and easily organize your workflow in the most visual and pleasant as possible, you need to try Toby.
Throttlehq
Throttle is an extension for Firefox, Chrome and Safari that works for one thing: to stop giving your email address everywhere . If there is something left over on the web they are services, and if something basically does all, it is asking your email for any reason that may occur to them.
So we all end up in one database after another and our inboxes cluttered with spam and offers that we do not care about. What does Throttle do? Generate a unique email address for you every time a field asks you , so you do not have to give your real address. Then you just have to wait for a single email with all the notifications and other junk you receive in all those daily directions, instead of a mountain.
We are sorry to say that it is not free but offers many interesting features. We know that you are not one of those who believe that paying for software is crazy and that everything should be free because yes.
Ghost for Facebook
Ghost for Chat is one of the simplest extensions that you will see in this list, but it has to make its entrance because it provides a function that unfortunately does not exist inside the chat of Facebook : the possibility of becoming invisible in it.
With this active extension nobody will be able to see when it was the last time you logged in, no one will know that you are online, you will be able to read the messages sent to you by your friends without the warning that you have seen them, and you will see all your list Of connected contacts and open any conversation without leaving a trace.
Flatbook
This is another of my favorites of the year, Flatbook is an extension for Chrome that improves the appearance of Facebook and gives a more beautiful, flatter, faster, and also free advertising.
It may be a bit confusing at first because of the way you organize feed sections into icons on the right in two different panels, but you get used to it fast. With Flatbook Facebook looks much nicer, and you can always deactivate the customization layer with a single click, thanks to the button they add in the upper left.
Raindrop
Raindrop is the most beautiful bookmark manager you’ll find on the web. It serves to save all type of content that interests you and to look or to read later. Be pictures, articles, videos, presentations, screenshots, etc.
Everything you can organize in collections by themes, with suggestions of labels and doing batch operations in a dream interface. We could say that it is a hybrid between feed reader, app to read later, bookmark manager and content reader.
Distract Off
If you do not have enough willpower to stop procrastinating and need some help, DistractOff is an extension for Chrome that prevents you from visiting websites that are just wasting your time.
Its operation is basic and lethal: you add a blacklist of banned sites that you can not visit at certain times and ready. If while you work try to watch videos of kittens impulsively or to get a little into the lives of others by reviewing social networks, the extension comes into action and blocks your entry with a message that urges you to return to what matters.
Thundertick
Thundertick is a search engine for your browser. This add-on for Firefox and Chrome allows you to search within any part of them, be it favorites, history, open tabs and windows, downloads you’ve made and applications and extensions installed. All from one place.
When I met Thundertick what surprised me the most is that this does not already exist by default within the same browser. Yes, you can search within a web, or in your history, or in your applications, but everything is in a different part of the browser. This search engine is really a super tool.
AccessURL
Do you want to share a service account like Netflix with someone else without having to give them your username and password ? That’s just what AccessURL does . If you install this extension in your browser, all you have to do is enter the service web and click on the extension button.
AccessURL will generate an address with which the person to whom you want to give access can enter your account. No sharing plaintext passwords through WhatsApp. You can set an expiration date even. This extension works for the moment only with Firefox, but work on being available again from the Chrome Web Store.
Bonus: uBlock Origin for Microsoft Edge
The new Microsoft browser unfortunately has not much to emphasize on the side of the extensions, unfortunately there are still very few more than we would like, but at least this year came a very good : uBlock Origin.
The broad-spectrum blocker is now available in the Windows Store and serves to reduce resource consumption, improve browser performance and block not just intrusive ads but crawlers and threats to user privacy.