What’s up guys, I’m ThioJoe, and today is another video about cool browser extensions
for Google Chrome that you might not know about.
Obviously you probably won’t want to install every single one, but hopefully at least some
of them will be useful to you.
Starting off with number 1, we have the extension called “Night Shift”, which lets you put
a warm color overlay over webpages, so it’s a bit easier on the eyes, particularly at
night.
This kind of feature is already built into Android and iOS, and even Windows, because
blue light is known to disrupt sleep at night, so if you just want it for Chrome is this
an option.
You can set it to be used whenever you want and on any schedule.
It has options for a custom schedule, sunrise to sunset mode, and manual mode too.
You also have the ability to set the specific color for the overlay, and the strength of
it, so if you want it to be really red you can have that, or lighter orange.
Or you can even make it blue if you want for whatever reason, like maybe you actually want
to stay up late, who knows that might help.
Ok next up for number two, this is going to be one for all you sports buffs, and it’s
called 365Scores, which lets you keep track of live sports scores for any number of teams
or leagues you want to track.
Now I don’t follow any sports so I can’t really tell you how well this works personally,
but it seems to be popular and with good reviews, so it’s probably worth checking out.
The interface is definitely ugly as hell, it looks like it’s straight out of 2005,
but seems to have a lot of info.
Like you can track specific teams and then can go to the scores tab and it will show
games from those teams, or you can choose All Teams and it will show everything in that
league, and let you choose past and future dates.
Might come in handy if you follow lots of sports.
Alright moving on, number 3 isn’t really useful, more just kind of neat.
And it is called “Custom Cursor”, which is just like it sounds.
When you click the extension icon, it brings up a big selection of different cursors you
can replace yours with in Chrome, from regular looking colored ones, to cartoon characters
and random icons.
If you click “more cursors” it will take you to their website which has a ton more
collections or packs for cursors, and there really are a lot of them.
Now if you’re like me, you are probably suspicious of extensions and apps like this,
forever traumatized from back in the old days of the 2000s where you’d see ads for “hundreds
of free smileys” that ended up just being spyware.
But, this extension does actually seem to be legit, and somehow completely free, with
no paid options at all, which was surprising.
It also gives you the ability to use your own custom cursor image if you want, choose
cursor size, and even select some favorites that it will rotate through automatically.
So some of you might like this.
Onto number 4, this one a lot of you will probably like, and it is “Delete All Messages
for Facebook”.
And yep, it does just that.
It’s only purpose is to allow you to bulk delete conversations and messages on Facebook.
It’s dead simple, you just open Facebook, and there will be an option at the top to
delete messages, and you can make it so it will either delete all your messages, or choose
specifically which ones.
Be aware though, once you do it, there’s no way to get them back, which of course is
the point.
One major thing to keep in mind though, is that according to Facebook, even if you delete
the messages on your side, it won’t delete them from your friend’s inbox.
And there’s no guarantee that even if you and your friend delete a conversation, that
Facebook doesn’t keep it stored behind the scenes forever.
So the usual advice applies, never post anything on the internet, and ESPECIALLY on Facebook,
that you don’t want being out there permanently.
Alright number 5 is one I really like, and it is called “Picture In Picture Extension”,
and it’s actually made by Google themselves which is cool.
How it works is when you’re watching a video on YouTube, you can either press Alt+P or
just click the extension icon, and it will open a little pop up box for the video that
stays on top, so you can navigate around other tabs and keep watching it.
You can move the box around and expand it, and there’s a button to send it back to
the original player.
One thing I’ve noticed though is you need to keep the original tab open, because if
you close the tab, the video box will close too.
And if you click away to something else in the original tab while the video box is playing,
it will freeze or glitch out.
Also the controls on the box are limited to just pause and unpausing, but you can keep
using the video player in the original tab to control it even when it's in picture-in-picture
mode.
But despite the limitations, it works well and smoothly, so I’m a fan.
We’re up to number 6, which is the “Video Speed Controller With Hotkeys” extension.
Yet another literally named extension, this one allows you to easily control the speed
of most videos playing on any website, even if it doesn’t have a native speed option
in the player.
You can increase or decrease playback by 25% increments by either clicking the extension
icon, or using the Shift Bracket hotkeys.
You also have some other options like rewinding by a few seconds.
I find this extension really useful, because these days I watch nearly every YouTube video
at increased speed, so I’m used to it, and it’s painful on sites that don’t allow
you to speed up playback.
It doesn’t work on every single website and video player unfortunately, but I’d
say it works in most cases at least.
Ok number 7 is another useful one called “Volume Master”.
This extension gives you total control over volume levels in Chrome, such as increasing
or decreasing volume of specific tabs, as well as the ability to boost tab volume up
to 600%.
Of course keep in mind boosting it too far might release in the audio clipping and sounding
distorted, but might be good in situations where a tab’s audio is legitimately too
quiet.
The extension can also give you a list of tabs playing audio and switch to them directly
if you want.
Keep in mind Chrome already will show a little icon for tabs playing audio, but if you have
a TON of tabs, this might be easier.
Also be aware if you want to just mute a tab, Chrome has a built in feature to do that by
just right clicking a tab and selecting mute tab.
But this extension is still good if you need more specific control.
Alright next up number 8, we have the extension “Print Friendly”, which is really useful
in some cases when you want to print out a website, or save it as a PDF or something.
You probably know that for a lot of websites, when you try to print them they look totally
messed up, with weird formatting and useless web elements taking up a ton of space.
You definitely know what I mean.
What this extension does is lets you remove parts of a website before it gets sent to
the printer, so you can remove anything that’s messing up the way it looks.
After you click the extension icon, it brings up an interface where you just click on elements
to remove them, along with other controls such as being able to reduce or increase text
size between 70 and 130%, and also reduce image size in 25% increments, or just remove
them completely by selecting 0%.
Then once you have it looking the way you want, you can send it to the usual print dialogue
menu, or save it as a PDF from here.
Though I think Windows already has a built in option these days to save as PDF from the
print dialogue menu anyway.
But this extension isn’t perfect and on certain websites using it actually makes the
page look worse, like on Google for example, but on other sites it definitely does help,
so it’s good to have just as an option if needed.
Alright coming near the end we got a couple more, and number 9 is called “Super Simple
Highlighter”.
What this does is lets you highlight text with a variety of colors on any website by
first selecting the text, and then right clicking, and using the highlighter option to pick a
color.
In the options you have some basic settings like customizing the colors to choose from,
the opacity of the highlighter, and whether you want the edges to blur or not.
What’s also nice is it will store the highlighted text so you can keep them as notes for later.
And the next time you visit that same page, it will usually re-highlight that same text.
The extension info page does warn you that it might have trouble re-highlighting the
text if the content of the web page changes, but even in that case I believe it should
still keep all the highlighted text stored in the extension menu.
And fun fact, this is the extension I personally use when I make videos talking about tech
news on my second channel, ThioJoeTech.
You’ll usually see when I’m talking about a news article I’ll have some highlighted
and this is what I used.
So as a side note, if you didn’t know about my second channel, be sure to check that out,
I use that for much more casual discussions about cool tech news.
But anyway, finally on to number 10, we have a fun extension called “Netflix Party”,
which allows you to easily watch shows on
Netflix with friends, and automatically synchronize
everyone.
How it works is after you open Netflix and and start a show, you click the extension
and select “start the party”, then it gives you a link to give to whoever else you
want to watch with.
You can also select whether you want others to be able to control playback or just you.
Keep in mind that everyone will have to have the extension installed for this to work,
and you’ll all have to be logged in to Netflix.
What’s also neat is it creates a little chatroom where anyone can post stuff if you’re
not already using some other chat program.
And here it also tells when someone skips to different parts so you can keep track of
all that.
Now based on the reviews, it seems some people have trouble with this extension so it probably
isn’t perfect, but it does seem to be updated regularly enough, so it seems like it should
work in most cases.
And if not, you can always do it the old fashion way and just do a countdown in your group
chat and hope everyone clicks play at the same time.
So there you have it, let me know which of these extensions you like the most.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I’d recommend is a cool video talking about
the different versions of Google Chrome, like the beta, developer, and even canary versions.
So if you’ve never heard of that, you can just click that video right here.
But anyway, thanks for watching guys, and I’ll see you in the next one.