My Favorite Chrome Extensions

Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus prevents advertisements from being displayed to you. Nearly any big time website now has advertisements on it, and when you visit them regularly, you’re going to become annoyed and get a lot of the same advertisements regularly. It doesn’t matter if it is a video, a banner, text link or even pop up – it gets blocked.
I understand that advertisements help fund the websites I visit. I understand that advertisements help inform me of products that are available. However there are simply too many. Without Adblock Plus, I get advertisements for hockey and software related products all the time. When I go to YouTube I have to watch an advertisement that is longer than the video itself.

Copy Link Text

Copy Link Text is a very simple, but effective extension for copying and pasting links. While I don’t use it regularly, when I do use it, it saves me a lot of time. Rather than having to highlight the link (which can be difficult based on how the browser behaves sometimes), then copying it, I can just right click on the link and select “Copy Link Text” and the text displayed is what goes to my clip board. I use it regularly when in my bug tracking system at work.

Firebug Lite

Firebug Lite is a great tool when it comes to  development. I use it a lot when it comes to styles so I can examine the styles being applied, where they’re coming from, as well as modify them right in the browser to see what rules I need.
However, The DOM explorer, as well as script viewer also makes this tool extremely beneficial to anyone doing front-end web development. There is a console tab as well that looks like a glorified console for JavaScript debugging and logging but I have yet to use it.

TweetDeck

A popular tool for your social media needs. TweetDeck allows you to log into multiple twitter accounts, and maintain them all in one area. It is great for people who run different online brands, and don’t want to have to log into many different accounts. Simply compose your update, select which account(s) you want that update posted to and go.
You can also schedule posts, post images, use their auto link shortener, follow trends, and a few other interesting little tools.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar 

The newest addition to my extensions is CheckerPlus for Google Calendar. This extension is fairly powerful and integrates with Google Calendar. In the corner of your screen, a small notification will show up when you’er coming up on an appointment. You can snooze it if you like but it will come back. It is a lot like the notifications for Outlook, but using Google Chrome.
You can also schedule new events in your calendar right from your browser by clicking a button. While there are a ton of configuration settings, it makes it very powerful and a bit overwhelming at first. But once you set the settings to how you want them, you really never go back into it.