THE 15 BEST Chrome Extensions for 2022

Ben Darfler
5 min readApr 19, 2022

Following on my 20 Best Mac Apps for 2022 post I wanted to dig into the Chrome Extensions I can’t do without. Here we go!

Productivity

Clockwise

As an engineering leader, my calendar is a dumpster fire and it’s hard to overstate how simple yet powerful Clockwise is. Once enabled for a meeting it will move that meeting around within the day or week to optimize the free time for all participants. I used to spend hours a month optimizing my calendar for longer focus time blocks. Clockwise automates all of that and easily pays for itself with the increased focus time I get each week.

It also has other nice features like color coding your meetings based participants, scheduling a lunch break, adding focus time meetings, and the Slack integration keeps slack status in sync with your calendar.

Grammarly

In distributed teams, strong written communication is critical. I’ve built up strength here over the years but I also owe a lot to Grammarly. I can rely on it to catch all my spelling and grammar mistakes in just about any online text box or document editor.

Simplify Gmail

I was a ride-or-die Google Inbox fan until its untimely demise. Thankfully one of the Inbox co-founders is still out there making Gmail better through Simplify Gmail. This is by far the best Gmail enhancement extension and is well worth paying for.

Moly HaH

Moly HaH is an app for keyboard navigation. Press your trigger keyand each link on the page is visually tagged with a short key combination. Type that combination to “click” the link. There are more powerful tools out there like Vimium but I prefer the simplicity of Moly HaH.

Smooth Key Scroll

Smooth Key Scroll is an app for keyboard scrolling. The perfect companion to Moly HaH. Pick from arrow keys or Vim keys or a few other options and scroll without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Content Curation

Pocket

Pocket is a read it later app that has been at the heart of my content curation toolchain for years. Any article interesting article I come across gets added to Pocket for later. If you are still using the “leave a million tabs open and hope you come back to them” approach I highly recommend checking out Pocket.

Send to Kindle

Occasionally a site won’t play nicely with Pocket, this is when I will fall back to Send to Kindle. In extreme cases where the site doesn’t play nicely with Send to Kindle, I can select the text directly and send it which nearly always works.

Buffer

Buffer is the other side of my content curation flow. With Buffer you can queue up posts to send to multiple social media sites on a set schedule. If I’ve captured a particularly interesting article on Pocket or my Kindle I’ll share it back out on social media via Buffer.

Privacy & Security

LastPass

I get that there are holy wars between the various password managers but the important thing is to get one and use it. If you are still reusing passwords on the internet in 2022 you are doing it wrong.

Eno

I’m a Capital One customer and Eno is their browser plugin for virtual credit cards. With Eno, I can use a different, unique credit card number for each aiste. Not only does this keep my credit card number secure but if my credit card is compromised I don’t have to update a million different websites. And, as a bonus, I can make purchases online without pulling out my credit card.

uBlock Origin

Let's face it, the web is basically unusable without an ad blocker and the one you need is uBlock Origin.

Miscellaneous

GoFullPage

GoFullPage does one thing. It takes screenshots of an entire long website. Nothing fancy, but it does what it says on the tin and it does it well.

Neutral Face Emoji Tools

Distributed teams depend on emojis, particularly in Slack. Neutral Face Emoji Tools brings drag and drop emoji uploading to Slack for even easier custom emoji additions for all your expressive needs.

Wide GitHub

Wide GitHub does exactly what it says; it makes GitHub … wide. As someone who rocks an ultrawide monitor, it is a necessary addition to my GitHub experience.

Smile Always

My final site-specific extension, Smile Always, makes sure I make all of my Amazon purchases on smile.amazon.com so Amazon sends 0.5% of all the dollars I spend to the non-profit of my choice.

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Ben Darfler

Engineering Leader, Father, Meditator, Elected Official, He/Him. Currently Director @ Honeycomb.io