Your browser doesn't need 47 AI extensions

I had 14 AI Chrome extensions installed last month. Fourteen. My browser was using more RAM than a video editing suite, pages were loading like it was 2005, and half of them were doing the same thing: injecting a little AI sidebar that I never clicked on.

So I did a cull. Disabled all of them, then added them back one at a time, only reinstalling the ones I actually reached for. The result? Eight extensions. That's it. Eight that genuinely make browsing better, and the rest can quietly uninstall themselves into oblivion.

Here's what survived.

The essentials (install these immediately) Perplexity (best for research)

The Perplexity Chrome extension is, hands down, the most useful AI extension I've used. Highlight any text on a page, right-click, and you get an instant AI-powered summary with sources. No switching tabs. No copy-pasting into ChatGPT. Just highlight and go.

The sidebar search is brilliant too. You can ask follow-up questions about whatever page you're reading without leaving it. Reading a dense technical article and don't understand a concept? Ask Perplexity in the sidebar and it explains it using the context of the page you're on.

It also replaces your new tab page with a search interface, which I initially hated and now can't live without. Instead of opening Google, I open Perplexity, and the answers are better about 70% of the time.

Why it survived the cull: I use it 10-15 times a day without thinking about it. That's the test. Grammarly (best for writing)

Yes, I know. Grammarly has been around forever. But the AI rewrite features they've added in the last year have turned it from a spell checker into something genuinely useful. It catches awkward phrasing, suggests tighter alternatives, and the tone adjustment feature actually works.

Where Grammarly really earns its keep is in email. I write probably 30 emails a day, and Grammarly catches at least one embarrassing mistake per session. Not just typos, but genuine clarity issues where I've written something ambiguous that could be misread.

The extension is lightweight too, which matters when you're being ruthless about browser performance.

Why it survived the cull: It prevents me from sending embarrassing emails. That alone justifies its existence. ChatGPT Extension (best all-rounder)

The official ChatGPT Chrome extension gives you quick access to ChatGPT from any page. The keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+O on Mac) opens a little chat window where you can ask questions, summarise pages, or draft quick responses.

It's not as focused as Perplexity for research, but it's more versatile. Need to rewrite a paragraph? Summarise a long article? Generate a quick reply to a message? The ChatGPT extension handles all of it without opening a new tab.

The "summarise this page" feature works well on most content, though it struggles with pages that load content dynamically or have paywalls (obviously).

Why it survived the cull: It's the Swiss Army knife. Not the best at any one thing, but competent at everything.

The specialists (install based on your needs) Monica AI (best free all-in-one)

Monica is the extension I recommend to people who don't want to pay for anything. The free tier is surprisingly generous, and it combines chat, writing assistance, page summaries, and image generation in one extension.

The writing assistant is decent. Not Grammarly level, but perfectly fine for drafting social media posts or quick email replies. The translation feature is genuinely good if you regularly read content in other languages.

The catch: The free tier has daily limits. If you hit them regularly, you'll either need to pay or use something else. But for casual use, Monica punches well above its weight. Merlin (best for quick answers)

Merlin lets you get AI responses on any website with Cmd+M. It's fast. Faster than opening ChatGPT, faster than switching to Perplexity. If you just need a quick answer while browsing, Merlin is the most frictionless option.

It also integrates with Google Search results, showing AI summaries alongside your search results. This is genuinely useful when you're doing quick research and don't want to click through ten links.

The catch: The free tier is quite limited (about 100 queries per day on the basic model). The Pro plan is $19/month, which feels steep for what's essentially a shortcut to an LLM. Waspnest (best for screenshots and visual tasks)

This one's niche but brilliant. Waspnest lets you take a screenshot of anything on a page and ask AI questions about it. Struggling with a confusing UI? Screenshot it and ask "what does this button do?" See a chart you don't understand? Screenshot and ask for an explanation.

For anyone doing design reviews, QA testing, or just trying to understand complicated dashboards, this is a time saver. It's also useful for quickly extracting text from images, which comes up more often than you'd think. Glasp (best for highlighting and notes)

Glasp is a social highlighting tool with AI features bolted on. You highlight passages on web pages, and the AI can summarise your highlights, generate notes from them, or connect related highlights across different articles.

I use it when researching topics for articles. Highlight the key points from five different sources, then ask Glasp to synthesise them into an outline. It's not perfect, but it saves the tedious work of manually compiling notes from multiple tabs. Compose AI (best for autocomplete)

Compose AI gives you AI-powered autocomplete everywhere you type in the browser. Gmail, Google Docs, Slack, Twitter, anywhere with a text field. Start typing and it suggests completions, which you accept with Tab.

It's subtle and unobtrusive, which is why I like it. It doesn't try to write for you. It just finishes your sentences when the ending is obvious, saving you a few keystrokes per message. Over a full day of typing, those seconds add up.

The ones I uninstalled (and why)

Sider AI: Does everything Monica does but charges more for it. Redundant.

MaxAI: Constant popups asking me to upgrade. Annoying enough to uninstall within a day.

UseChatGPT.AI: Used to be good, but the quality has degraded. Responses are slower than the official ChatGPT extension and the interface feels clunky.

Fireflies: Only useful if you're in a lot of browser-based meetings. Too niche for a permanent extension slot.

Otter.ai extension: Same as Fireflies. Good for meetings, useless otherwise, and it was always listening in the background which made me uncomfortable.

Copilot (Bing): Microsoft's AI extension is surprisingly bad. Slow, intrusive, and it kept trying to redirect me to Bing. Uninstalled within an hour.

The performance question

Let's talk about what nobody else mentions: browser performance. Every extension you install adds memory usage, and AI extensions are particularly hungry because many of them maintain persistent connections to their servers.

With all 14 extensions installed, Chrome was using about 4GB of RAM just idling. With my curated eight, it's about 2.3GB. That's still a lot, but it's the difference between my laptop fan staying quiet and sounding like a jet engine.

If you're on a machine with 8GB of RAM (looking at you, base model MacBook Air owners), be even more selective. Pick three at most: Perplexity, Grammarly, and one wildcard based on your specific needs.

The honest recommendation

If you install only one: Perplexity. It's the most useful AI extension I've ever used, and it's free.

If you install three: Perplexity, Grammarly, and the ChatGPT extension. These three cover research, writing quality, and general AI assistance without overlap.

If you want the full stack: All eight I've listed above. But monitor your RAM usage and be prepared to cut some if your browser gets sluggish.

The AI extension gold rush has produced a lot of rubbish. Dozens of extensions that are just thin wrappers around the same APIs, competing on marketing rather than quality. Don't fall for the flashy demos. Install, test for a week, and be ruthless about uninstalling anything that doesn't pull its weight.

Your browser will thank you.