10 Free Google Chrome Extensions to Increase Your Productivity

Google Chrome is an excellent browser that offers great features and robust performance. What you may not know, though, is that Chrome supports “extension” modules that can further enhance its capabilities. Install the right extensions and you’ll be surprised to see how your productivity improves.

Check out this list of 10 must-have free Google Chrome extensions. (Some have paid upgrades.) You’ll also need to be using Google Chrome in order to download them.

Paul Mah is a freelance writer and blogger who lives in Singapore. Paul has worked a number of years in various capacities within the IT industry. Paul also enjoys tinkering with tech gadgets, smartphones and networking devices. You can reach Paul at paul@mah.sg and follow him on Twitter at @paulmah.

Need a quick screenshot of your browser? You’ll appreciate the Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate extension. You can use it to clip a selected area, all visible portions, or even the entire page. Moreover, you can annotate captured images with simple shapes or text. You can also redact sensitive information using the eraser tool. Saving files to Google Drive is supported.

Dualless is a simple but valuable Google Chrome extension designed specifically for folks who need a quick way to snap two browser windows to two sides of the same screen with a click of the mouse. Yes, it’s not the most sophisticated offering out there, but the design is intuitive and works well. Dualless supports various alignment ratios, as well as both horizontal and vertical modes, and it works just fine on multiple monitor setups (even though it’s touted as a solution for those using one monitor).

More: 6 Ways to Use Multiple Displays With Your Laptop

Do you typically work with dozens of tabs at a time and find your computer grinding to a halt from the overhead? Instead of bookmarking the tabs into yet another folder that you have to waste time maintaining, the OneTab extension lets you close all running tabs and save them into a list with just one click. This dramatically reduces tab clutter, while freeing up large amounts of system memory. The tabs in the list can subsequently be restored all at once, opened individually or deleted outright.

Related: Google Chrome Browser Tabs Can Travel From Device to Device

If you use Google Drive, then you must install the Save to Google Drive extension for Chrome. This lets you save Web images, documents and HTML5 audio and video files by right-clicking on them and selecting “Save to Google Drive.” This is definitely more elegant than saving to your PC and then moving a file into the appropriate Google Drive folder.

Related: Google Unifies Cloud Storage, Extends to 15GB for Free