If you keep more than ten browser tabs open at a time, you are likely watching your computer slow down while your fan spins out of control. It also causes pages to freeze up as they add up, and plenty of other issues. However, a few lightweight browser extensions can fix your problems. Some people even keep extensions installed over time.
I Can’t Use YouTube Without These 6 Extensions
These YouTube browser extensions make your watching experience so much better.
It cuts out promotions
If you’re tired of sitting through baked-in sponsorship reads every time you open YouTube, SponsorBlock is the fix. You install it from the Chrome Web Store, and it runs in the background from that point on, automatically detecting and skipping sponsor segments, intros, outros, and subscription reminders without you touching anything. It makes you love watching videos again.
It is one of the worst parts of listening to videos in the background, and I’m so glad to have this fix. What makes it work so well is that it runs on crowdsourced data. Other viewers flag and timestamp the segments they want skipped, and those submissions get verified through a weighted peer review system before they affect anyone else’s experience.
A cool part is that if you come across a sponsorship or tangent that hasn’t been flagged yet, you can mark the start and end times yourself directly on the YouTube player and submit it for review. Once verified, it starts helping everyone else watching the same video. So it’s like you’re actively helping and benefiting from this.
Use Auto Tab Discard to save memory
Your browser doesn’t need to hog RAM
Browsers are notorious for their memory usage. Firefox normally uses a little below 2GB in memory, but Chrome is usually far above that. The issue is that you’re using gigabytes of RAM just to keep inactive pages alive in the background.
Once you install Auto Tab Discard, you set an inactivity limit in the preferences, something like ten minutes for a normal machine or as low as thirty seconds on older hardware. Any tab that sits untouched past that threshold gets suspended automatically.
The extension strips away the memory-heavy scripts running in the background while keeping the tab’s title and icon fully visible in your browser bar, so your session looks completely normal from the outside. You’ll notice your computer get so much faster with Auto Tab Discard.
You also get full control over what gets suspended and what doesn’t. Pinned tabs, tabs with unsaved text input, and anything currently playing audio or video can all be excluded from automatic suspension just by messing with the rules.
Clicking any suspended tab reloads it, right where you left off, up to your scroll position. I tend to leave fifty tabs open when I’m deep in a research project, and this extension is the only reason my computer doesn’t slow down.
Bring back the dislike counter
Don’t let YouTube hide bad videos
When YouTube decided to hide the public dislike count from its platform in late 2021 after the majority of viewers hated its rewind, we all lost a way to quickly evaluate video quality. The Return YouTube Dislike extension solves this problem.
This tool adds the dislike count right back into the player button. It brings the public counter back to YouTube by combining archived data with statistics.
Specifically, the extension uses a database of nearly one billion videos whose exact dislike metrics were scraped and archived before Google officially disabled public API access to this data. For newer uploads, the system calculates an estimate based on the ratio of likes to dislikes from the extension’s millions of active daily users.
This helps you stay away from guides that don’t stay on subject, clickbait, or just a bad video. YouTube should bring the button back anyway, but until it does, this is the best alternative.
Detach your video player again with Picture-in-Picture extension
Watch your videos while you work
The Picture-in-Picture Extension lets you use picture-in-picture on more browsers. It was developed directly by Google Chrome Labs, surprisingly, but for some reason, it isn’t a default on Google Chrome. Picture-in-picture works in Firefox, but I used to have so much trouble with Chrome.
After it is installed, press its keyboard shortcut, which defaults to Alt + P on Windows or Option + P on macOS, or click its toolbar icon while watching a video. It detaches any web video you are watching and drops it into a floating, fully resizable window that stays on top of all your other open software apps.
I like to use this while I’m doing the part of my work that is just a lot of clicking and not a lot of thinking. I also know people who play games and listen to videos. I’d say it’s a good way to listen to a lecture while you get the busywork of your games done.
I really wish this were a default setting instead of an extension. If enough people download this, Google may focus on it. So this could be the start of a really cool feature in Chrome.
Zoom over images with Hover Zoom+
Stop clicking links just to see a picture
Not many people like going to get the magnifier app every time they need to zoom, and trying to do so on webpages leaves you with a mess. It makes everything format weird, so it’s better to have an extension to use. Once you install Hover Zoom+ from the Chrome Web Store, you can start hovering over a link and seeing a zoomed-in preview of the page.
You should head into its configuration menu after you install it to carefully adjust the activation delay settings. This is pretty important because you can avoid a chaotic flurry of pop-up images from appearing every time you casually stop over a link or thumbnail.
This works well on most sites like Reddit, Amazon, and Google Images. On Amazon, the extension keeps the high-resolution product shots instead of the little ones you’re used to. On something like Reddit, you can go through photo galleries and watch the first few seconds of video clips or GIFs just by resting your cursor on them.
It’s time to get extensions
Installing a dozen browser extensions sounds like a hassle, but if you want to reclaim your system memory and skip the artificial annoyances that platforms build into their websites, these specific tools are worth your time. They handle the quiet background work of filtering out distractions and managing memory, letting you focus on your actual work without dealing with browser issues.
- OS
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Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS/iPadOS, ChromeOS
- Developer
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Google LLC
- Price model
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Free
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google LLC, built for speed, security, and integration with Google services. It uses the Blink rendering engine (formerly WebKit) and supports extensions, tab sandboxing, synchronization across devices, and frequent updates.