Video: 5 Google Chrome Extensions You Can't Live Without

For years, browsing the Internet was a restricted, linear experience. You logged on, checked your email, did some research, maybe played a few games, and logged off. Nowadays, in the wild west of the web, browsers are almost entirely open source, meaning enthusiastic developers can make plugins and extensions for browsers that enhance your web surfing potential.

One of the world’s most popular browsers, Google Chrome, has one of the biggest app stores packed with extensions for anyone to download and use. And after using dozens of these extensions ourselves over the years, we thought it as good a time as any to share our top 5 most recommended extensions with you.

Oh, and they’re all free.

Pocket – Catching Up on Your Reading on Your Time

First up is Pocket, a reading list extension that allows you to easily save online articles you want to read for later. Pocket automatically syncs pages you want to read across all your chrome-enabled devices, and even allows for offline viewing. Over 1.4 million Chrome users use Pocket, so give it a shot and see if it’s right for you. We certainly dig it.

Awesome Screenshot – It Does What You Think it Does, Just Awesomely

Do you ever need to take a screenshot of something on your PC? Beyond that, do you ever need to take a screenshot, edit it lightly, and then quickly publish it online? If you’re like us, then you do it all the time. A fantastic app for handling all of that is Awesome Screenshot.

You can use it to snap a picture of the entire screen or just the section you want, add highlights and circles around particular areas of interest, and even blur out the rest. It’s a great plugin to have in the taskbar, and easier than using that dusty print screen button.

ChromeReloadPlus – Don’t Waste Your Time Waiting, Let this Extension Do it for You

You know those times when you’re waiting for a livestream to start, or waiting for a product pre-order page to arrive, and you’re left to manually refresh until it happens? Well, with ChromeReloadPlus, you won’t have to – as it’ll reload any page for you automatically, as often as you like.

You can set it to increments like once every few seconds, once a minute, or even once an hour if you’d like. That way, you’ll never miss what you’re after, and you definitely won’t miss the time you saved.

Personal Blocklist – For Blocking Search Results You Wish Didn’t Exist

As web users, we spend a lot of time searching, and using Google to do it. And because we’d like to spend that valuable search time discovering answers, wouldn’t it be nice to block sites we know aren’t going to give us the information we need, especially if those answers have a price tag attached?

If you use Personal Blocklist, you don’t need to worry about it. Just let it passively block sites you’re uninterested in, and it’ll keep those sites out of your search results. Pretty useful.

Web Developer – A Web Design Tool that Doesn’t Make You Want to Pull Your Hair Out

Finally, for all the web developers out there, there’s an extension called, well, web developer. It allows you to push and play with elements on your website without actually making server-side changes. You can resize, reshape, reoutline and rearrange widgets, objects and frames as you wish, to get a better idea of how a page will look before you alter it.

It’s great for the web designers and site owners out there.

And that’s all we have to recommend today, but keep a tab open on BestTechie.com for all the latest on dandy new Chrome extensions, as well as features and news on the latest in the tech industry. Anything we missed?