Key Takeaways

  • Key Jump Keyboard Navigation and Vimium offer keyboard shortcuts for faster navigation in Chrome, allowing users to open pages and perform actions without using the mouse.
  • Yet Another Drag & Go FIX adds drag and drop functionality to Chrome, making it easy to open links, select text, and perform search operations.
  • Quick Tabs and CrxMouse Chrome Gestures provide additional tools for managing and navigating through multiple tabs in Chrome, making it easier to find and switch between tabs efficiently.

A good thing about browsers is that they are extensible—you can extend their functionality. Google Chrome is an excellent example of this, and its extensive range of add-ons and extensions allows you to customize your browser just how you like it.

One improvement for any browser is navigation. How can you control the browser better to navigate the internet faster? Well, with the Chrome Web Store, you have heaps of extensions you can use for faster browsing.

1. Key Jump Keyboard Navigation

Key Jump Keyboard Navigation is a novel extension for Chrome that enables you to open pages by pressing corresponding key numbers for their hyperlinks. When installed, pressing the period or comma keyboard key adds numbers to the links on web pages. You can open the pages by pressing the numbers for their hyperlinks with your keyboard.

Numbered hyperlinks enabled by the Key Jump Keyboard extension

Key Jump Keyboard Navigation is a nice idea that can facilitate slightly faster page navigation with keyboard keys. Pressing a key for a link can be a little quicker than moving, positioning, and clicking the mouse. At any rate, the Key Jump extension promotes the concept of mouseless browsing. We've also looked at how to browse the web without a mouse and similar Chrome extensions that enable you to open pages with keys.

Download: Key Jump Keyboard Navigation for Google Chrome (Free)

2. Vimium

If you are adept with Vim or a Vim fan, this extension alone easily overshadows the others. While it doesn't support all the Vim key bindings (how can it possibly be?), it does support the most common ones that can be directly applied to a browser.

You can use the h, j, k, l keys for scrolling. A gg to scroll to the top, a G to scroll to the bottom, / to enter search mode, and the familiar n and N to find next and previous. In addition to many such obvious bindings, Vimium also adds some of its own, like the H goes back in history, and L takes you one step forward in history. J and K can be used to go one tab to the left and one to the right, respectively, and many more. You can actually type ? to get an overview of all the shortcuts.

The Vimium options tab

In addition to all that, Vimium also offers the functionality offered by the Key Jump extension mentioned above. Just hit the f or the F key, and it displays a hint next to each clickable link or input control on the page. Key in the hint, and you are taken to that link or control. You can also remap these shortcuts using Vimium preferences.

Download: Vimium for Google Chrome (Free)

3. Yet Another Drag & Go FIX

Moving a little toward the mouse now, Yet Another Drag and Go lets you complete a variety of operations with a simple drag operation. You can open new links in the foreground or in the background, open links before or after the current tab, convert text links to URLs, select text, and search in one of the different search engines or add your own. All this with just drag and drop.

The Drag and Go settings tab

You can add your own search engines via settings and configure the drag-and-drop zones for each of them according to your liking.

Download: Yet Another Drag & Go FIX for Google Chrome (Free)

4. Quick Tabs

Do you have heaps of tabs open in your browser simultaneously? If yes, you know how hard it can be to find the exact tab you are looking for, especially with Chrome, where tabs are reduced to just favicons when you have a lot of them open.

The solution? Quick Tabs. Just hit Ctrl + M, and Quick Tabs presents you with a list of all the open tabs sorted in the order in which they were recently used.

The QuickTabs extension

You can use the arrow keys to quickly switch to the tab you want, or better still, you can actually type some of the characters of the tab you are looking for, and Quick Tabs will search in the title and URL to list only the tabs that match the letters you typed. Quick Tabs also keeps track of recently closed tabs and allows you to search and restore closed tabs as well.

Download: Quick Tabs for Google Chrome (Free)

5. CrxMouse Chrome Gestures

Mouse gestures enable you to perform common browser actions with specific mouse movements. This can make navigation faster since you can perform actions like closing, refreshing, reopening, and scrolling tabs with quick mouse gestures instead of finding and selecting options. Browsers like Vivaldi and Opera incorporate built-in mouse gestures, but Chrome users need extensions to add such a feature.

CrxMouse Chrome Gestures is one of the best extensions for adding mouse gesture navigation to Chrome. This add-on includes 14 default mouse gestures you can try after installing it. It enables you to create custom mouse gestures for various browsing actions. This extension also includes color, transparency, and width customization settings for the mouse gesture lines.

The CrxMouse extension

Aside from that, CrxMouse has additional mouse cursor options. You can select 15 alternative mouse icons for Chrome and reconfigure their size with this extension. Or select to upload and set a downloaded cursor for Chrome.

Download: CrxMouse Chrome Gestures for Google Chrome (Free)

6. AutoControl

AutoControl is a Chrome extension with which you can set up custom mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts for faster browser navigation. It includes many basic and advanced actions to which you can assign custom keyboard and mouse gestures. Customizable keyboard shortcuts are especially useful for accessing browser options quickly.

The AutoControl extension settings

Note that AutoControl isn't an entirely standard browsing extension. It has an additional native component for installing on Windows PCs. Therefore, this extension only works for the Windows desktop Chrome browser. Check out this guide to customizing keyboard shortcuts in browsers for further details about AutoControl.

Download: AutoControl for Google Chrome (Free)

7. Text Mode

Text Mode is a relatively simple Chrome extension that enables you to activate a text-only page mode at the click of a button. That text-only mode disables images and videos (including those of ads) from loading on pages and converts pages to black and white. This makes web browsing faster because text-only web pages load somewhat quicker than those stuffed with images and videos.

A BBC website page in text only mode

Download: Text Mode for Google Chrome (Free)

Make Your Browsing Faster With Those Chrome Extensions

There you have it, those are our suggestions. Those are Chrome extensions that enable faster navigation with customizable hotkeys, mouse gestures, new tab management features, key-enabled hyperlinks, and stripped-down webpages. Adding a few of those to Chrome extensions will supercharge your web browsing.