Today, we have excellent browsers to choose from, and even more extensions and add-ons which hold the sole purpose of making our lives easier. It’s only a matter of finding the right ones. In this post, I will share with you a list of truly awesome Chrome extensions which can truly make your life easier. At least those aspects which have to do with browsing the web.

YouTube Options for Google Chrome

YouTube keeps changing. Sometimes we like the changes, sometimes we don’t, but most of all, we sometimes wish we could have more control over what YouTube looks like when we’re watching videos. YouTube Options for Google Chrome is a simple extension which lets you do just that.

The extension comes with an extensive list of options for changing YouTube’s default layout, as well as various playback, size and quality options. For example, you can set a certain size and quality for your videos, and have them automatically display that way every time. You can also disable auto-play, which is a very useful option if you’re regularly opening multiple YouTube windows.

On the layout side, you can choose to hide almost every aspect on the page, and also change the background to enhance your watching experience. The extension can also work with other video websites such as Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion and more.

Tabulate!

Ages ago, I heard about a service called BridgeURL. This handy web app lets you easily share multiple URLs in the form of a neat slideshow. How happy I was to find that BridgeURL’s technology also exists in a Chrome extension, which goes by the name of Tabulate.

If you’ve ever had the urge to share all your open tabs with a friend, Tabulate! lets you do this easily. Simply click on the Tabulate button and get a URL for all your tabs. You can then share this URL with friends. When they click on it, they will get a list of links which they can open separately, or choose to open all the links at once.

The most fun option, though, is viewing the links as a slideshow, which lets you browse through all the links one by one in the same window. I only wish there was a way to choose which tabs I want to share, instead of automatically sharing all of them.

Page Snooze

There are numerous ways to tackle the “too many tabs” problem, but despite that, I still find myself with a chock full of open tabs so as to not forget to look at them “later”. If you have the same problem, Page Snooze is going to come in mighty handy.

With Page Snooze, you can snooze any open tab for a certain amount of time. When that time is up, the tab will automatically open again. This means you no longer have to keep a tab open for a week just so you can look at it on Sunday.

Clicking the extension icon will snooze a page for one week. If you want to choose a different time window, right-click on the page itself and choose your preferred window from the context menu. In the extension’s options, you’ll find a list of all your snoozed pages and the date and time of their expected return into your browser.

Hopefully, this extension will get more options in the future, such as setting specific snooze times or at least something shorter than 1 day. As it is, it’s still really useful.

Readability Redux

The web is a cluttered place. Usually, this is not a problem, but when all you really want to do is read something, things can get quite distracting. Readability Redux is an awesome extension that lets you quickly unclutter any webpage, so you can comfortably concentrate on what’s important – the text.

There are five different styles to choose from, and you can also choose your font and margin sizes. You can set your own hotkey to activate the extension, and easily get a readable version with a quick press of a button. You can even apply Readability only to a selected fragment, and while this feature is still experimental, it worked very well for me.

Aside from comfortable reading, you can also use Readability Redux to create printer friendly versions of any webpage, and e-mail pages or fragments to friends.

Hover Zoom

Are you tired of having to click every single picture you want to view? With Hover Zoom, all you have to do is hover. Hover your mouse cursor over any image, and you will immediately get to view this image in full size. No clicking, no opening new pages. Clean and simple.

The extension works on almost every website; if a website supports it, the Hover Zoom icon will appear in the address bar. In the options, you can control delay times and other aspects of the display, disable Hover Zoom for specific sites, and create action keys to disable or enable Hover Zoom. This one is a true keeper.

Conclusion

Browsing should be fun, not tedious. There are some true life-savers out there. If you haven’t found the right one here, be sure to check out our Best of Chrome extensions page.

Are there any Chrome extensions that make your life easier? Tell us all about them in the comments.

Installing Chrome extensions is easy as a click and you don’t even have to hold your breath. But we shouldn’t forget that extensions are little programs that feed off our computer’s resources. And some can be real resource hogs. Also, too many extensions create a clutter that’s not so aesthetic when you want some clean real estate on your browser. Not surprisingly, the answer lies in another extension that manages its brethren with a remarkable discipline, and thus makes for a better browsing experience.

Say hello to Context, a Chrome extension that I consider to be a must-have in your army of Chrome extensions.

Create Chrome Extension Groups and Manage Them Better

Context organizes your extensions into ‘contextual’ groups. That is to say, if you are listening to music or watching movies, Context allows you to load only the extensions that relate to that. The remaining ones can be kept hidden. Here’s how you go about creating a few extension groupings using Context.

1. After installing Context, a brief tutorial shows how you can set up Context.

2. Go into the Options for the extension to set up your first group. Context neatly lists all the extensions that you have installed. You can also check the advanced options (as in the screenshot) to also include apps. Click on New Context.

3. Name the group and choose from the available icons.

4. Creating a Context group is as easy as dragging the extension tile into the grouping. Drag the extensions from the list above to the Context group below to populate the relevant group. You can drag the same extension to all groups if you want to include it in more than one group. You can click on the cross icon if you go wrong. You can change the order of the extensions within a group. You can also drag the groups to change the order of preference as it would appear in the Context dropdown. Click on the Save button.

5. The Context icon itself appears as a white jigsaw piece on the Chrome toolbar. Click on the icon to reveal the dropdown. You can click on one group to load extensions belonging to that while hiding all the rest. Clicking on All extensions brings back the entire lineup of course.

6. When a new extension is installed Context brings up a small notification pop-up that lets you you assign it to appropriate groups via the notification window. You do not need to open the configuration page.

Switch between Extensions and Boost up Your Browsing

Context is not only for de-cluttering your browser toolbar by hiding extensions you do not need immediately. By loading only those extensions that you need right now, Context also frees up memory which otherwise would have been utilized by all the extensions you have installed.

Consider these two screenshots for a comparison:

Context and its one-click switching is a productivity booster. Do you think it can be a claimant to a tiny corner of the Best Chrome Extensions to have in your browser? What do you think?

The web gives us quite a few little games which are boredom killers in their own right. That perhaps explains the success of games like Angry Birds. Little Alchemy is a little gem tucked away in the Chrome Web Store. So, let’s install the Chrome app and play this free Alchemy game.

A Game for the Entire Family

An uncomplicated game has the advantage that it can be enjoyed by the entire family. How easy is Little Alchemy? It’s as simple as mixing four basic elements to create something new. The four elements that one starts off with are water, fire, earth, and air. You have to combine them by dragging and dropping them (only two at a time) to produce new surprising new forms.

But if you think that this simple game is unsophisticated, then you are wrong because it gets pretty addictive.

Mix, Match, and Create

Gameplay is so simple that a child can pick it up without hitting the ‘help’ icon on the left. In fact, your child should definitely play this game as it is educational to a degree too.

The screen is divided into two areas – the one on the right has four elements that you are supposed to mix-match and combine in order to create some interesting combos. The mixing and matching happens on the workspace that lies on the left of the screen.

Combine any two elements. One way of making this more interesting would be to guess what the resulting mix would be. Some combinations (especially the earlier ones) are dead simple. For instance, water + fire = steam.

You can then take the resulting ‘element’ (for instance, steam) and combine it further with another element from the library of elements. For e.g. steam + air = cloud. You can in fact, right click on any formed element and check the combinations again. Remember, not all elements with combine. The combinations are all logical. You can in fact use a form (click the bulb) to suggest combos of your own.

The combinations keep getting more intricate and increasingly difficult to predict. In the third or fourth try, I got ‘gunpowder’ by combining fire and dust. Your library of elements on the right that you can use to build more elements also starts stacking up. Click on Type to Search is your library is choc-a-bloc and you need to search for an element.

The Challenge – Score of 230

Your target is the possible 230 combinations that can be created from four basic elements. The early stages of Little Alchemy do not give away signs that the game will be addictive, but it gradually gets challenging and the target of 230 or at least the maximum possible number could soon get to you. So, as the notification above says – stay positive. Oh, there is an official cheats page too.

Little Alchemy is a nice addition to Chrome’s lineup of games. Which is your favorite Chrome browser game? What do you think of Little Alchemy…did it help to ward off the boredom?

Today’s Picks

As you launch the add-on, you are greeted with a gigantic macro shot of something edible (and hopefully appetizing). For example, here’s a Banana-maple tower:

This looks tiny because it is a screenshot of my full screen, resized to fit the blog. But you can see how much space the image takes up. But it’s not just an image:

You can read basic facts about the dish, and then click through to the recipe (we’ll look at the recipe display in a moment).  In case you don’t like the first dish, you can easily scroll between four other options. Since it’s an add-on, the large images all load instantly, and the whole thing feels very responsive and instant.

What’s Available

Let’s focus on the header for a moment:

Here you can clearly see the scroller used to flip between “Today’s picks“. Other entries include recipes (the bulk of the app, really), videos, and ingredients. There’s one more option to the right of favorites, which is subscribing to the BBC GoodFood newsletter. Let’s take a quick look through each of these categories.

Recipes

The initial recipe display shows each recipe as a “card” with an image and some quick facts. One thing I like about the app is that it’s very straightforward and honest about the amount of recipes available. While websites like Allrecipes.com boast an endless supply of crowd-sourced recipes, BBC GoodFood is almost like a small cookbook in your browser, with a limited and curated collection of recipes.

The top bar lets you instantly filter recipes by type, as well as by “Less than 200 calories“, “healthy classics“, etc. You can also do a custom search, if you’re after something very specific:

But realize you may not find what you’re after, due to the relatively small number of recipes the app currently offers. For example, when I searched for a chicken-based Moroccan dish that would serve six, the app found nothing. It did find a recipe when I was searching for four servings, though, so I know there is a Moroccan chicken recipe.

I wish the app could just scale ingredient lists up and down automatically by the number of servings I’d like to make – this is something Allrecipes does today, and doesn’t seem like a very difficult feat to accomplish.

Individual Recipe Display

Once you found a recipe you like, it is time to learn how to make it. The individual recipe display screen is simple and informative, with a single image of the recipe (which you can enlarge), an ingredient list, and a list of instructions. One niggle is that the typography is a bit on the tiny side, so if you want to use it as a reference while cooking, you may want to zoom in (Chrome’s zoom feature works within the add-on, so you can just hit Ctrl and +).

Cookery Videos

The video section currently has just a handful of videos about basic cooking techniques. This is one part of the app that actually didn’t work for me. The video did buffer, but I could not get it to play. Definitely underdeveloped, but it shows potential.

Healthy Ingredients

The Healthy Ingredients section lists ten different ingredients, each with nutritional information and buying, preparation and storage tips. It’s a short list, but each ingredient has a hi-resolution image and thoughtful information.

Final Thoughts

BBC GoodFood looks like a promising add-on. What I like best about it is that it feels very curated – it feels as though the recipes and all content were carefully edited. The downside is that there is not a lot of content, but if you are looking for oodles of content, there are plenty of recipe websites out there.

I love our commenters. You guys ask me questions, give me tips and generally help make this site what it is. It’s particularly true over at MakeUseOf Answers, where for the most part it’s our readers providing the best solutions for technical problems. It’s true on most tech-oriented sites – people just help each other out, outside of the occasional Mac/Windows/Linux flamewar thread.

It’s a different matter elsewhere, however, including newspapers and YouTube. People type what’s on their mind before they think, and certainly aren’t trying to be helpful. Frequently they’re not even talking about anything relevant. This post from NPR sums things up nicely, but it gets much worse than that. XKCD offered one solution for the problem, but if you’d rather not wait for that fix to take hold I highly recommend Shut Up. It’s a simple installation and works so well you’ll forget it’s there.

Get Rid Of Them!

First things first, download Shut Up from the Chrome Web Store. Once the extension is set up you’ll see a new icon on your extension dock; click it any time you want to turn comments back on for a particular site. Like I said before, Shut Up will remember which sites you like seeing comments on.

How well does this work?  Very well. I tested it on a variety of sites, and found that comments simply disappeared. For example, here is YouTube with comments:

Hurray, arguments! Here’s how the bottom of a YouTube video looks without comments:

The noise is replaced with white space, allowing you to watch videos without someone stating that they think one girl is hot or calling the uploader a homo. Brilliant! For some reason you can still leave a comment. Don’t.

Similarly, if you’re sick of nuanced news articles being followed by an in-depth discussion of which politician is the biggest douchebag, you can create white space below newspaper articles as well:

Voila! The comments box remains, but the comments are gone, meaning you can continue believing in the intelligence of mankind.

By default, Shut Up remembers which sites you turned comments on for. You can change this simply in the settings:

That’s about it for this extremely simple plugin. It worked for me on a vareity of blogs, including MakeUseOf and Lifehacker. It also worked on every newspaper I tried it with.

Give it a spin yourself and feel free to let us know if it works for you. In the comments (ironic, I know).

The Futility Of Comments

I’m all for people being able to speak their minds, and there are certainly examples around the web of comments sections being helpful and engaging. It’s certainly not the norm, though, which is why I like this plugin.

Of course, this tool can also be used to remove MakeUseOf’s comments. It shouldn’t be. Our commenters are, for the most part, awesome. Sometimes Dave LeClair says something stupid, but that’s worth putting up with for the sake of the rest of you. Speaking of Dave, he recently wrote a half-decent article about extensions for Chrome that clean up the web. It’s pretty good, considering who wrote it.

Do you know of any other cool tools to block website comments? Suggest them in the comments below. I realize you probably won’t, because you’ve blocked our comments, but whatever.

Chrome OS will fail — not by going down in flames, but by being quietly folded into Android. In fact, Android is already absorbing Chrome OS as we speak. R.I.P. Chrome OS; you were too far ahead of your time.

Offline Just Isn’t There

People use computers offline. It’s a simple fact, but Google struggles with it. When Chrome OS was announced, HTML 5 was all the rage. Surely, HTML 5 would bring strong offline support to Chrome OS. It wouldn’t matter where you were, you could still use your computer.

June 15, 2011: Chrome OS launches and the first Chromebooks start shipping out. Can users read their email, look at their calendar or edit documents offline? Nope, not yet.

The first stages of offline support were rolled out in August, 2011. Currently, you can view your calendar offline, view recent documents and – drum roll – there’s even offline Gmail!

Wait, I thought Gmail worked offline. Oh, that’s right – there’s a special app for offline Gmail. Google bolted offline support onto Gmail’s tablet interface instead of making it work properly with the regular Gmail app.

It’s now 2012 and offline support is still incomplete at best. You can’t create new calendar events offline. Google Docs has viewing capability offline, but you can’t create a new document or edit an existing document without an Internet connection. I’m a big Google Docs user and whenever there’s a connection hiccup and I can’t continue writing, I reconsider that choice.

Android Is Absorbing Chrome

Google expects Chrome OS and Android to “converge”. Does that mean Chrome OS is going to run Android apps? It doesn’t look like it.

Android is already absorbing Chrome OS. Android 3 brought a Chrome-style browser interface and Chrome bookmark sync to tablets. Soon, Chrome itself will run on Android and you’ll tap a Chrome icon on your Android device to open the default web browser.

When Android smartphones and tablets have the full Chrome browser experience, does it really make sense to have a more stripped-down system for notebooks? Google was once considering Chrome OS for tablets, but it’s now betting on Android tablets.

The Windows 8 Problem

Microsoft is dragging Windows into the 21st century with Windows 8. Whether you love the Metro interface or hate it (I’m skeptical about Metro on the desktop), Windows 8 will include native support for first-class HTML 5 apps.

Is it any question that Windows 8 will have Metro apps that work offline? Imagine a full-featured Hotmail app that works offline. Or a Microsoft Office suite that synchronizes online with Office web apps and SkyDrive. Dramatic boot speed improvements and an integrated app store will bring many of Chrome OS’s features to Windows.

Microsoft’s offering will always have the legacy Windows desktop to lean on, even if it doesn’t have perfect support for web apps. Unless Chrome OS evolves quickly, it will be completely outclassed on its own turf by Windows 8.

It’s All About The Apps

The Android Market has over 400,000 apps. The Chrome Web Store? Nowhere near that. What’s more, many of them, including Google’s own (which should be flagship apps that show the potential of the platform,) are just bookmarks to websites.

Chrome OS is going up against Windows and Mac OS X – desktop operating systems with extensive application libraries. It’s fine as a niche project if you only want a web browser, but it hasn’t proven its own as a legitimate platform yet. The occasional app that uses Chrome’s technology to provide a rich experience is notable because it’s such a rare exception.

Android Everywhere

Windows 8’s fusion of touch and keyboard interfaces provides an example Google will likely follow. We already have Android tablets with apps designed for large screens; just add a keyboard dock and you have a replacement for a Chromebook that also works as a tablet. By the way, it’s already been done — it’s called the ASUS Transformer.

I’m a big Google fan — I use the Chrome browser, Android and a lot of Google’s web apps. I was even intrigued when Chrome OS was announced. But I’m sad to say, it’s just too ahead of its time.

So what do you think? Will Chrome OS continue to be a niche product until it’s replaced by Android? Or will I regret this post when we’re all using Chromebooks in 2020? Speak your mind in the comments.

I tried to have the same outlook while searching for a few good offbeat (but almost useless) Chrome extensions inside the Chrome Web Store. Searching for these hidden ‘gems’ is an exercise in fun, because you never know what you will come across. After all, didn’t they say that Twitter was useless as a communication tool?

So, tag alone and do your own digging. In the meantime, tell me what you think of these seven offbeat Chrome extensions.

Jimmy Wales

You would be living in a digital la-la land if you don’t know who Jimmy Wales is. Well, he is the nice guy who co-founded Wikipedia. You owe it to him when the encyclopedia tells you everything that you throw at it. Some days you see a banner asking for a donation or making a personal appeal when you visit Wikipedia. With the Jimmy Wales Chrome extension, you can get his handsome mug shot beam down at you from every page you visit on Google Chrome.

Use: Serves as a gentle reminder of what we wouldn’t be able to do if Wikipedia sinks.

Look of Disapproval

A good enough social and communication Chrome extension, but the only communicating you would be doing is showing your dislike. Look of Disapproval is a set of expressive emoticons mostly composed of Unicode characters. You can use them to show your disapproval on any website, social forum, or discussion board.

Use: I am taking it to Facebook ???????

Mustachio

Groucho Marx or Tom Selleck, I don’t know which one you prefer. Me, I hate moustaches; but that doesn’t stop me from playing around with this extension on any image that’s over 300px X 150px. Adding moustaches to photos is childish play, but fun for a child.

Use: Minimal, because you will go crazy finding the right image to add a moustache too. Try it on your girlfriend’s photo when she is not around.

Jailbreak the Patriarchy

This offbeat Chrome extension swaps the gender anywhere you encounter it on the web. Male turns into female and vice-versa. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”. It works on Google search results too. You can toggle between male and female gender swaps.

Use: Makes for fun reading, but does very little for the Battle of the Sexes as everything is equally swapped.

2012 Countdown

The Mayan’s aren’t here anymore, and they damn well made sure that come 2012 no one else will. As the description of this offbeat but fun Chrome extension puts it – A simple countdown to keep track of time when the world will end (December 21, 2012). Meant for fun, not to make you depressed.

Use: Meant for fun, not to make you depressed.

AutoRage

This offbeat extension replaces faces in an image with rage faces. This extension is just an extension of a pop culture.

Use: For those who are heavily into Rage comics.

Nothing

Precisely! This extension does nothing. Perhaps, it was someone’s idea of a passing the time when he had nothing left to code. Do read the reviews. As someone puts it – There is pretty small number of things that working one hundred percent perfectly… this extension is one of them.

Use: 3500+ users…did they find something in the nothing?

These seven Chrome extensions serve to while away a lazy afternoon. It certainly helped me do exactly that. Did it do the same thing for you? Did I miss some great Chrome extensions that are useless, offbeat…but still interesting? Send us the mentions in the comments and tell us about your favorite ones.

Set Up Bookmark Syncing In Chrome

For ChromeMarks Lite to work, you first need to enable syncing of your Google Chrome bookmarks between computers. In the browser, click the wrench icon in the top right and open > Options. It will open in a new tab. Go to > Personal Stuff and click the > Sign in to Chrome or > Set up sync… button, depending on what is displayed for you.

In the advanced sync preferences pop-up window, select the items you want to sync, such as your > Bookmarks. When you’re done click OK.

Your bookmarks will now be synced with your Google account. To access your Google Chrome bookmarks on a different installation of the browser, simply perform these same steps and all your synced data will be imported from your Google account and subsequently synced with it.

Set Up ChromeMarks Lite On Your Android Device

To access the bookmarks that are synced from your Google Chrome desktop browser to your Google account, download and install ChromeMarks Lite.

When you first open the app, you will see that there are no bookmarks in the database yet. Click the > sync button to initiate the synchronization.

Note that you first have to provide permission to the app. Once this is done, it will initialize and start syncing your bookmarks from your Google account.

This procedure will only take a few seconds and then all your bookmarks will be available in the ChromeMarks Lite app, as shown below. Note that ChromeMarks Lite does not support auto-syncing. Hence, to get the latest bookmarks from your Google account, you occasionally need to click the > Sync button in the top right.

When you click a bookmark, it will either open directly in your default browser or ask you which browser you want it to open with.

By the way, clicking on a bookmark for more than a second will open a menu with options to open it in a new window, share the link or copy the URL.

Does ChromeMarks Sync With My Android Browser Bookmarks?

ChromeMarks Lite does not offer this feature. To integrate ChromeMarks with your Android browser, you have to upgrade to the full version of the app. Unfortunately, Honeycomb and some Samsung users are partly left out, as the tool does not integrate or sync with the stock browser on Android Honeycomb and some Samsung phones. However, before you risk upgrading, you can verify whether or not your device will support the upgrade options using ChromeMarks Lite.

Click the menu icon in the top right, then select > Settings and go to > Upgrade Options.

A green checkmark indicates that your device supports the respective feature, while items marked with a red cross will not be available. Since I am on a Samsung Honeycomb tablet, ChromeMarks presently is not able to sync with my browser bookmarks.

Conclusion

It is a pity that you have to use a third-party app on your Google Android device to access bookmarks synced to your Google account. However, at least this app comfortably enables you to access bookmarks synced with your Google account and despite the limitations of the free version, it is very useful. I reckon that the paid version is worth upgrading to if your Android device supports syncing with your installed browser. Otherwise it’s only worth it if you want to enable manual editing of bookmarks and auto-syncing.

How do you sync bookmarks between your desktop and mobile devices?

With the latest stable version of Google Chrome you can create multiple browsing profiles on the the same computer, switch between them easily and sync all of them across different computers. Not all users have to be signed in, so if one user wants his data to be synced and another doesn’t, this is entirely possible.

First of all, to sync your Chrome data with your Google account, go to the wrench menu and choose “Sign in to Chrome”. Now, if you want to add more users, go to “Options/Preferences” in the wrench menu, choose “Personal Stuff” and click on “Add new user”. When you do that, Chrome will immediately create a new user with a random name and icon, and will open a new browser window for that user. You can now edit each user and give it the proper name, icon, and sign it into a Google account to sync it.

The implementation is very cute – you can choose different icons such as people, animals, foods, etc. for each profile, which is then added to the Google Chrome icon in the task bar. You can have different browser windows for different users, and differentiate between them using these personal icons.

According to Google, the new feature “isn’t intended to secure your data against other people using your computer, since it just takes a few clicks to switch between users.” They are providing the service merely as a convenience for people who already share computers.

Source: Google Chrome Blog

But the reverse is also true to a certain extent. You need your browsing history to go back to an important website and retrieve some information. Sometimes, your browsing history also tells you a lot about the quantity and quality of time you spend on the internet.

Try out the following Chrome extensions that give you a visual picture of your browsing habits via your browser’s history.

History Trends

History Trends displays your browser history in the form of an interactive statistical chart. But you don’t have to be a statistic student to understand all the graphs and lines. You can click on the graphs and filter your history according to the criteria available. Trends display your top ten visited domains and their URLs; daily stats and the busiest days with the daily visit counts. Graphs also break down the data to day, week, and month (time series graphs). A useful stat is the ‘transition type’ which basically plots how the browser navigated to a particular URL on a particular visit.

Visual History

Visual History again is an extension for the ‘scientifically inclined’. Browsing history is displayed as an intersection of nodes and sub-nodes. The interactive graph displays your browsing behavior as inter-relationships. For instance, two pages are linked together if you browsed them consecutively in less time than 20 minutes. Nodes are also color coded – older pages are in blue, current ones are in yellow. The tool has a zoom feature and along with the mouse, you can play around the graphic.

History Analyzer

From interactive graphic tools, we go to a simple one. History Analyzer is a very simple Chrome extension which takes your browsing history and puts it on a pie chart. Each slice of the pie represents the percentage of hits for that domain. The color coded pie chart tells you at a glance the domain which has been getting the most attention from you.

Chrome History X

Chrome History X replaces the default history and gives you a few richer tools to work with. It displays two fields which helps you search and manage your browsing history by date and keyword. You can delete selected histories or take the usual route of clearing all your history data in one go. A single click lets you visualize your browsing history with the help of a bubble chart. Associations between websites are shown by intersecting bubbles.

HistoryStats

History Stats provides you with what may seem like a dull display of sites visited; but take a closer look. The Chrome browser extension breaks down your browsing history into sites and the total number of visits and most recent visits to those web sites. You can sort your browser history by ascending or descending order of visit counts and last time visited. You can also go for selective deletion of historical links.

Admittedly, we don’t really care about our browsing history. It seems on the face of it, something that should be deleted when our browsing session is done with. But dive into it once in a while. Browsing history gives us a few footprints to follow to enhance our productivity. For instance, a glance with the help of these visual Chrome extensions can tell you that you are spending a lot of time on Facebook and not elsewhere. Alternatively, you are reaching a specific website in two hops, which you can reach in one to save some time.

These 5 Chrome extensions help you visualize your browsing history. But do tell us if you find them productive enough once in a while.