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Twelve Chrome extensions that still run, do one job well and ask only for the permissions that job needs — what each one does, what it costs, where it falls short, and the three checks that keep a bad one off your browser.
12 min read · Published · Updated
Most lists of the best Chrome extensions are assembled from the store pages themselves: the description, the marketing screenshots, the install count. That is how extensions that no longer run, or no longer exist, keep getting recommended. The twelve below all run on today's Chrome, do one job well, and ask only for the permissions that job needs. For each one: what it does, what it costs, and where it falls short.
A few well-known names are missing on purpose. The reasons are under What made the cut.
If you install only one: uBlock Origin Lite. Every page loads faster and cleaner, and you notice the moment you sit down at a browser without it.
| Extension | Best for | Price | Users (store) | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| uBlock Origin Lite | Blocking ads and trackers | Free | 17M | 4.5 (3.4K) |
| Bitwarden | Passwords and autofill | Free; Premium about $10/yr | 7M | 4.3 (8K) |
| Privacy Badger | Blocking trackers ad blockers miss | Free | 1M | 4.5 (2K) |
| OneTab | Collapsing open tabs into a list | Free | 2M | 4.4 (14.6K) |
| Tabliss | A calm new-tab page, no permissions | Free | 100K | 4.7 (384) |
| Dark Reader | Dark mode on every site | Free | 7M | 4.7 (13.1K) |
| Video Speed Controller | Speed control on any HTML5 video | Free | 3M | 4.5 (4.5K) |
| Vimium | Keyboard-only browsing | Free | 500K | 4.8 (4.6K) |
| SideBoo | Finding a tab, history or bookmark by typing | Free | New in 2026 | — |
| Immersive Translate | Bilingual page translation | Free; Pro for AI/PDF | 3M | 3.9 (2.9K) |
| SingleFile | Saving a page as one HTML file | Free | 600K | 4.4 (1.1K) |
| Raindrop.io | Bookmarks with full-text search | Free; Pro about $28/yr | 400K | 4.1 (781) |
Every name in that table links to its Chrome Web Store listing. User counts and ratings were read there on 24 August 2026, rounded the way the store rounds them.
Three questions, in this order. They are the same three to ask before installing anything that is not on this list, because the store does not ask them for you.
We make one of the twelve — SideBoo, in the tabs section — and say so there.
uBlock Origin Lite blocks ads, trackers and most cookie walls with a single toolbar icon and no configuration. Pages load faster because less loads. It is the extension people miss first on a machine that does not have it, and the one to install before anything else on this list.
The word to notice is Lite. The original uBlock Origin was built on Manifest V2, which Chrome has retired, so it no longer runs — even though its listing is still up. Lite is the same author's rewrite for Manifest V3. It filters a little less than the original could — no dynamic filtering, fewer custom rules — and that is a real loss for people who tuned their own rule sets. On everyday sites you will not see the difference.
The downside is that some sites detect blockers and refuse to load until you whitelist them. That is a two-click job in the popup above.
Best for: everyone. Price: free. Store: 17M users, 4.5 (3.4K ratings). Permissions to note: reads and changes site data, which is the job.
Bitwarden saves logins, fills them, generates strong passwords and syncs across devices, and the free tier does all of that with no limit on the number of passwords. It is open source and independently audited, which is the bar a password manager has to clear before any feature matters: you are handing it every account you own.
The downside is polish. The popup is functional rather than pretty, and 1Password and Proton Pass both look better. Neither does anything on the free tier that Bitwarden does not.
Best for: anyone still reusing passwords. Price: free; Premium about $10 a year for TOTP codes and file attachments. Store: 7M users, 4.3 (8K). Permissions to note: reads page content to find login forms.
Privacy Badger comes from the EFF and does one narrow thing: it watches which third-party domains follow you across sites and blocks the ones that do. It is not an ad blocker and does not replace one; it is the second layer, catching behavioural trackers that do not look like ads.
The downside is that it learns rather than ships with a list, so it blocks little in its first days on a new profile. Give it a week.
Best for: pairing with uBlock Origin Lite. Price: free. Store: 1M users, 4.5 (2K). Permissions to note: reads site data on all sites, again the job.
Click the icon and every open tab in the window becomes a line in a list; click a line to bring one back, or restore all. It frees memory because the tabs really are closed, the list is plain text so nothing about it can break, and there is nothing to learn.
The downside is what happens next. The list does not sync between devices, has no real folders, and becomes the next pile, which is what tab hoarding does to every collapse tool: the OneTab list ends up holding hundreds of tabs nobody reopens. OneTab is a rescue tool, not a system.
Best for: a quick reset when the tab strip is unreadable. Price: free. Store: 2M users, 4.4 (14.6K). Permissions to note: tabs only.
Tabliss replaces the blank new tab with a photo, the time and a greeting, and lets you add a to-do list, a quote or a search box. It runs entirely locally and asks for no permissions at all, which is the reason to pick it over the better-known Momentum; the other reason is that it is free.
The downside is the category it sits in. New-tab wallpaper extensions are exactly the cover a June 2026 adware cluster used: 152 of them, 105,000 installs, all declaring on the store that they collected no data. Tabliss is fine. Do not install one that looks like it from a publisher you cannot name.
Best for: anyone who opens a lot of new tabs. Price: free. Store: 100K users, 4.7 (384). Permissions to note: none.
Dark Reader turns any site dark by analysing the page rather than just inverting it, so text stays readable and images stay normal. One setting worth knowing about, because almost nobody mentions it: in the advanced options you can pick a sepia or "paper" tone instead of pure black, which is easier on the eyes over a long reading session than either extreme.
The downside is compatibility: some layouts break, and occasionally it hides an element you need. Turn it off per site — there is a toggle for that in the popup — rather than globally.
Best for: long reading sessions and late nights. Price: free on Chrome. Store: 7M users, 4.7 (13.1K). Permissions to note: reads and changes site data, needed to restyle pages.
A small pill appears in the corner of any HTML5 video: press d to speed up in 0.1 steps, s to slow down, z and x to skip back and forward. It works on course sites, conference recordings and anything else that uses a plain video element, and it remembers the speed per site. If you watch recorded talks at all, it pays for itself in the first hour.
The downside is the name. Several extensions on the store use it, including a "Pro" variant from a different developer. This one is the open-source original; check the developer name before you install.
Best for: anyone who watches recorded talks. Price: free. Store: 3M users, 4.5 (4.5K). Permissions to note: reads site data to find video elements.
Press f and every link on the page gets a two-letter label; type the letters to click it. j and k scroll, o opens a search across your history and bookmarks, T searches open tabs. The first afternoon is awkward. After a week, reaching for the mouse feels like a detour.
The downside is that it does nothing on pages Chrome walls off from extensions — the Web Store, chrome:// pages, the built-in PDF viewer — and it fights sites with their own shortcuts, such as Gmail. It has a per-site off switch for exactly that.
Best for: people who already use keyboard shortcuts everywhere else. Price: free. Store: 500K users, 4.8 (4.6K). Permissions to note: reads site data to draw the hints.
We make this one, so read the paragraph with that in mind. Everything above about tabs is about arranging them: OneTab collapses, Tabliss decorates, and tab managers, outliners and workspace tools like Tab Manager Plus, Tabs Outliner and Workona organise. None of them help when the problem is "I have fifty tabs open and I cannot find the one I need" — which is the complaint that comes up more than any other when people describe tab overload, and the one we took apart in why you can't close your tabs.
SideBoo is a command palette for the browser: ⌘K on any page opens one search box across your open tabs, history, bookmarks and recently closed pages, with the matches highlighted. You do not have to have organised anything first.
The downside is honest: it does not remind you that a tab exists, and if the workspace model of Toby or Workona suits you, keep it. The AI features use your own API key and everything is read locally; there is no signup.
Best for: people who keep more tabs open than they can see. Price: free. Store: new in 2026. Permissions to note: tabs, history, bookmarks — the three things it searches.
Chrome's built-in translation replaces the page. Immersive Translate puts the translation under each paragraph instead, so you read both and can check any sentence against the original — the difference between reading a news story and reading documentation, a paper or a contract. It also translates PDFs and subtitles, and you can point it at your own LLM API key instead of the bundled engines.
The downside shows in the rating: 3.9, the lowest on this list. The free tier's daily quota on the built-in engines is real, the upsell is persistent, and the occasional paragraph comes back as a translation-engine artefact. Bring your own key and the quota stops being the limit.
Best for: anyone who reads in a second language. Price: free; Pro for AI engines, PDFs and subtitles. Store: 3M users, 3.9 (2.9K). Permissions to note: reads and changes site data on all sites.
Bookmarks save an address; pages change and vanish. SingleFile saves the page itself as one .html file with every image and style inlined, which opens in any browser years later. The alternatives all have a catch: MHTML only renders properly in Edge, PDF export mangles anything with a sidebar, and the "page plus folder of resources" format falls apart the moment you move it.
The downside is that it saves what is rendered: scroll to the bottom of lazy-loading pages first, and it cannot save what is behind a login you are not in.
Best for: research, receipts and anything you would be sorry to lose. Price: free. Store: 600K users, 4.4 (1.1K). Permissions to note: reads site data to serialise the page.
If what you want is a place to put things rather than an archive, Raindrop.io is the clipper to pick over Notion's or Evernote's. It saves the link with a preview, tags it, and — the part that matters — searches the full text of everything you saved, so you find pages by what they said, not where you filed them.
The downside is the one that applies to every read-later tool: it is another place things go to be forgotten. It stores beautifully. Retrieval is still on you.
Best for: people who save more than they re-read. Price: free; Pro about $28 a year for full-text search and backups. Store: 400K users, 4.1 (781). Permissions to note: the active tab only.
Fewer than you have. Every extension runs code on the pages you visit and holds whatever permissions it asked for at install time, whether or not you still use it. The rule that works: keep the ones you would reinstall first on a new laptop, and audit the rest every couple of months.
chrome://extensions and look at the list without the icons — read it as permissions, not logos.Start with uBlock Origin Lite, Bitwarden and Dark Reader — the three that fix problems everyone has. Add Video Speed Controller if you watch recordings, or Immersive Translate if you read in a second language. Then, if the thing that actually goes wrong in your browser is finding the tab you had open an hour ago, that is the one we built, and you know how to check us: it is on the store, it is Manifest V3, and the permissions are listed.
Reputable ones are, but the store is not a guarantee. In June 2026 researchers found 152 new-tab wallpaper extensions with about 105,000 installs that logged browsing data and faked ad traffic, and in 2021 The Great Suspender was removed after new owners added malicious code. Before installing, check that it still exists on the store, that it has not changed owners, and that its permissions match what it does. A dark-mode or wallpaper extension that wants to "read and change all your data on all websites" is a red flag.
The original uBlock Origin is a Manifest V2 extension, and Chrome has switched that platform off, so it no longer runs even though the listing is still there with about 11 million users. uBlock Origin Lite is the same author's Manifest V3 rewrite, with about 17 million users, and is what you install now. It filters slightly less aggressively than the original could; for everyday ads and trackers you will not notice.
Everything in this list is free to install and useful on the free tier. The Chrome Web Store itself no longer handles payments, so extensions that charge do it through their own sites — Bitwarden, Raindrop.io and Immersive Translate all have optional paid plans. Nothing described here needs one.
Some do. Lightweight tools like uBlock Origin Lite, Vimium and Video Speed Controller barely register in Chrome's task manager, while anything that injects a large UI into every page can use tens of megabytes per tab. Open Chrome's task manager (Window → Task Manager) and sort by memory; if an extension you rarely use is near the top, remove it.
Not in Chrome for Android or iOS as of August 2026 — the mobile versions do not load extensions. Every extension here does work in other desktop Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi), installed from the same Chrome Web Store.
Research
Closing a tab takes one click. Deciding whether to close it does not, and that decision is what tab hoarding is made of. There are two different reasons people will not close a tab, they look identical from the outside, and they need opposite fixes.
How it works
Chrome sets no tab limit. What runs out is memory — and that depends far more on what is inside your tabs than on how many you have. Here is the honest answer, and how to measure your own ceiling.
Comparison
Chrome's Tab organizer suggests AI tab groups from a right-click. It is useful — and it is gated, desktop-only, and clusters by topic, not by project.