The Chrome extension problem

Most AI Chrome extensions are bloated, slow, and do one thing you could do by opening ChatGPT in a new tab. I have installed and uninstalled dozens of them over the past year, and the survivors list is short. These are the ones that actually earn their place in my browser.

The criteria for this list were strict: the extension must do something genuinely useful that I cannot easily do without it, it must not noticeably slow down my browser, and it must not be annoying (no pop-ups, no notifications, no "you haven't used me today!" guilt trips).

The essentials (install these immediately)

Grammarly

grammarly as a Chrome extension is probably the most useful thing I have ever installed in a browser. It runs silently in the background, checking everything you type in any text field - emails, social media posts, Google Docs, Slack messages, Notion pages, everything.

The free version catches spelling and grammar errors. That alone prevents multiple embarrassing mistakes per day. The premium version adds tone detection, which is particularly useful for emails. Is this email too aggressive? Too passive? Grammarly will tell you before you hit send.

I genuinely forget Grammarly is running until it catches something, which is exactly how a good extension should work. Zero friction, consistent value.

Perplexity Browser Extension

The perplexity extension adds an AI search sidebar to your browser. Highlight any text on a webpage, right-click, and ask Perplexity to explain it, summarise it, or find related information. You can also open the sidebar on any page to ask questions about the content you are looking at.

The "summarise this page" feature is what I use most. Land on a long article, click the extension, get a concise summary. If the summary is interesting, I read the full article. If not, I have saved fifteen minutes.

ChatGPT extension (official)

The official chatgpt extension adds a sidebar you can open on any webpage. The most useful feature is the ability to select text, send it to ChatGPT, and ask it to do something with it - summarise, translate, explain, rewrite, or answer a question about it.

For research workflows, this is faster than copying text, opening a new tab, and pasting it into ChatGPT. The time savings per interaction are small, but across dozens of interactions per day, they compound.

The specialists (install if relevant to your work)

Monica AI

Monica is an AI assistant that lives in your browser and can access the content of the page you are on. You can ask it to help compose an email while looking at the email thread, write a social media post while looking at the article you want to share, or summarise a document you are reading.

What makes Monica useful compared to just using ChatGPT is the context awareness. It knows what page you are on and can reference the content directly. This eliminates the copying and pasting step that makes browser-to-chatbot workflows clunky.

Cost: Free tier with limited daily interactions. Pro from $8/month.

Scholarcy

Scholarcy is a browser extension specifically for academic papers. Open a research paper (on ArXiv, PubMed, or any journal site) and Scholarcy generates a structured summary with key findings, methodology, limitations, and citations. It also creates flashcard-style summaries that are excellent for studying.

For students and researchers, this is invaluable. It does not replace reading the paper (nothing does), but it helps you decide which papers are worth reading in full. Given that the average researcher skims dozens of papers to find the few worth reading carefully, this saves enormous amounts of time.

Cost: Free tier available. Premium from $10/month.

Wappalyzer

Not technically an AI tool, but worth mentioning for developers and marketers. Wappalyzer identifies the technologies used by any website you visit. Visit a competitor's site and instantly see what CMS, analytics platform, hosting provider, and frameworks they are using.

I include it because it pairs well with AI tools. Identify a site's tech stack with Wappalyzer, then ask Claude or ChatGPT for insights about that particular stack.

Cost: Free for basic detection. Paid plans for bulk analysis.

Extensions I uninstalled and why

AI text generators in the browser: Several extensions offer "write this for me" functionality on any text field. They are consistently mediocre compared to using ChatGPT or Claude directly, and they slow down form inputs noticeably.

AI image generators in the browser: The quality is too low compared to using Midjourney or Flux directly. And the generation time means you are staring at a loading spinner in your browser, which is a terrible experience.

"AI-powered" tab managers: Multiple extensions claim to use AI to organise your tabs. In practice, they group tabs by domain, which any tab manager does without AI. The AI branding adds nothing.

AI notification tools: Extensions that use AI to summarise your notifications, emails, or news feeds. In theory, useful. In practice, another thing demanding your attention. I found myself checking the AI summaries AND the original notifications, doubling the distraction.

The performance question

Browser extensions consume memory and CPU. Every extension you install makes your browser slightly slower. The ones I have recommended above are all lightweight (under 50MB of memory each), but they still add up.

My rule: install the essentials (Grammarly, Perplexity), add one or two specialists relevant to your work, and resist the urge to install everything that looks interesting. Five well-chosen extensions will serve you better than fifteen that compete for resources and attention.

The browser should be a tool that gets out of your way, not a platform that demands engagement. Install what helps. Remove what distracts. And close some of those 47 tabs while you are at it.