I am a developer. I write a lot of code and read a lot of docs. About 18 months ago I realized I was copying text from a browser tab, switching to ChatGPT, pasting it, writing a prompt, reading the reply, and copying it back. I did that maybe 30 times a day. It was destroying my focus.
So I went looking for extensions that would let me skip the dance. After two months of testing, here are the five that stuck. All of them are still in my toolbar.
I picked these on three criteria: I use them at least once a day, they do one thing well, and they do not phone home with my clipboard.
1. Vimium
Keyboard navigation for every link and form on a page. Press f and every clickable element gets a 2-letter shortcut. Press them to click without moving your hands off the home row.
I thought this would be a gimmick. After two weeks I caught myself reaching for f on pages where the extension was not installed and getting annoyed. That is how you know it stuck.
Vimium is fully open source, runs entirely on your machine, and never reads the page content. It just listens to keyboard events.
2. 1Password
I used LastPass for 6 years. After the 2022 breach I switched. 1Password is the only password manager I have used where I do not think about the password manager.
What sold me was the CLI and the SSH key integration. I can run op read op://vault/github/token in any shell script and the token never lands on disk. The browser extension fills logins, but I do not have to type the master password more than once a day.
It is not open source. That bothered me for a while. The security model is published, the bug bounty is real, and I have been using it for 3 years without a single visible incident. I accept the tradeoff.
3. AI Buddy
This is the only one on the list I built, so I will mention that upfront and then tell you what it actually does.
Highlight any text on a page, press a shortcut, and the selected text goes to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, or whatever model you have set as default. The reply shows up in a side panel. You can keep reading the original page.
I built it because the copy-paste loop above was driving me nuts and no existing tool did exactly this. Most AI sidebar extensions either lock you to one model or send your selected text to a backend server. AI Buddy is BYOK (bring your own API key) and the selected text never leaves the browser. The keys are stored in Chrome's local storage.
It is open source on GitHub and has about 15 daily active users so far, which is small but growing. If you have ever wanted to send a paragraph to an AI without losing your place on the page, this is the workflow.
4. Tab Wrangler
I have a habit of opening 30 tabs and never closing any of them. Tab Wrangler closes tabs you have not looked at in a configurable amount of time, but keeps a list of what it closed so you can restore anything important.
I set mine to close after 4 hours of inactivity. It is one of those things you do not notice until you realize your browser has been using 2 GB of RAM instead of 8.
Open source, runs locally, no account required.
5. Raindrop.io
Bookmark manager. I had 4,000 bookmarks across Chrome's built-in manager, Pocket, and a Notion page. Raindrop consolidated them, gave me a real search, and let me organize by collection.
The reason it made the list is the extension: when you bookmark a page from Chrome, it auto-fills the title, description, and a screenshot. Saves me about 20 seconds per bookmark, which sounds small until you bookmark 50 things a week.
Free tier is generous. Paid tier is $3/month and I have paid it for 2 years without thinking about it.
What I tried and did not keep
- Grammarly: too aggressive, rewrote my voice in technical docs. Uninstalled after a week.
- Notion Web Clipper: I tried to use it for 6 months. The clips never matched how I actually searched for things later.
- Momentum: a new-tab dashboard with a daily photo. Pretty for the first day, then I turned it off because I wanted speed.
If you only install one of these, install Vimium. The rest depends on what actually annoys you about your current setup.
If you have a favorite extension I missed, drop it in the comments. I am always looking for one more thing to test.