I know, I've said bad things about Chrome extensions before. Still, I seem to have slowly accumulated a number of extensions that I use, some of which I even trust, and that means it's worth actually documenting them so I can keep track (and easily put them into a new Chrome instance someday).

Unsurprisingly, my Chrome extensions are broadly similar in spirit to my normal set of Firefox extensions. Some of these Chrome extensions date back to years ago when I made a serious attempt to set up a Chrome equivalent of my Firefox environment so I could give Chrome a fair trial.

The obvious cases:

• uBlock Origin works just as well in Chrome as it does in Firefox, and is good for the same things and the same reason.

• HTTPS Everywhere because I feel that this is a good idea and why not.

User interface issues:

• The bluntly named Don't Fuck With Paste (also, and, via) makes it so that websites can't stop you from pasting things into form input fields. These websites are basically wrong and they make me very annoyed, since how I manage website passwords requires paste to work.

  (The Firefox equivalent is disabling dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in about:config.)

• MiddleButtonScroll makes it so that you can scroll the page around with the middle mouse button. I'm extremely used to this behavior in Firefox, so I was happy to be able to get it in Chrome too.

• CLEAN crxMouse Gestures is a giant experiment that makes me nervous. There have historically been no good, non-spyware gestures extensions for Chrome (when one existed, it wound up corrupted). This extension at least claims and appears to be a 'clean' (ie non-spyware) version of the relatively good but spyware crxMouse Gestures extension. I'm not sure if I trust it, but I really, really want mouse gestures so I'm willing to take the chance as an experiment. If someone tells me that it too is bad, I will be sad but not surprised.

  (Adding this extension is what pushed me into writing this entry.)

Security, sort of:

• ScriptBlock is what I'm currently using as my NoScript equivalent on Chrome. Because my only major usage of Chrome is my hack use of incognito mode, I don't actually get much exposure to this extension so I don't really have any opinions on how well it works.

• FlashBlock for Chrome is theoretically there for the same reasons that I have it in Firefox, but again in practice I mostly use Chrome in a way that deliberately disables it so I don't really have many opinions. Plus, Chrome is increasingly disabling Flash all on its own.

Things that I should probably remove:

• Stylish is the Chrome version of the Firefox extension of the same name, which I used to make significant use of before I sadly discovered that it was part of my big Firefox memory leaks. In practice I don't use this in Chrome, but it seems harmless (and at the time I initially set up Chrome many years ago, it seemed like something I was going to want).

• Protect My Choices seemed like a good idea at the time that I ran across it but the more I look at it the more I'm not sure I should have this extension sitting around doing things.

  (It turns out that I only have this installed in my work Chrome, not my home Chrome. So it's going to get removed the next time I'm in the office.)

Since Chrome's incognito mode is mostly how I use Chrome, I have a number of these extensions enabled in it. Right now, the list is uBlock Origin, MiddleButtonScroll, Don't Fuck With Paste, and CLEAN crxMouse Gestures (because there isn't much point in adding a mouse gestures extension I don't entirely trust if I'm not going to use it).

In Firefox, I consider It's All Text! to be essential. Unfortunately Chrome's very different extension model means that the Chrome equivalents have always had to do terribly awkward things that made them unattractive to me.

Since incognito mode discards cookies when I close it down, I haven't tried to find any sort of cookie management extension. As usual, this might be a bit of a mistake, as I do use non-incognito Chrome just a bit and so I've probably picked up a certain amount of cookie lint in the process.

(For me, Linux Chrome is significantly faster than Linux Firefox for Flickr. Since logging in all the time is annoying, I use the regular Chrome in order to retain the necessary login cookies.)