Exploring Useful Browser Plugins for Google Chrome

In this video, we’re going to take a look at some useful browser plug-ins. Now, our browser extension is essentially applications that are installed to our browser. So let’s take a look at that. So the first one I’m going to start off with is Google Chrome. And I’m going to just type in Chrome apps. And that’s going to take us to the App Store here, which is Chrome.Google.com. Now, in here we can see there’s a bunch of different plugins that we can put in here. So the first one I want to show you is HTTPS. So if you go into the search bar here, you could do HTTPS, and then everywhere. OK, I’m going to click on that.

And then you can go ahead and instal it. So let me go ahead and instal it on mine. And then I can show you how to instal it. So it’s pretty simple. So first, let’s take a look at this. So HTTPS Everywhere is by EFF. And what it does is it forces a HTTPS extension. So if I go to, say, Google.com, and I just type in Google.com instead of going to HTTP colon, forward slash, forward slash, google.com, it’s going to force it to HTTPS. So it’ll always try to force a secure connection if whenever possible. And as we saw in previous videos, we definitely want that for security purposes.

So all I need to do is click on Add to Chrome here. And I’m going to click Add Extension. And then we’re done. On this, you can simply close this out. And now we have our extension installed here, actually right here. So whenever we go to any website– I can do Google.com, it’s going to force it to an HTTPS extension whenever possible. So let’s take a look at some more apps here. So I’m going to do Chrome apps. And the next one I want to show you is called uBlock.

So uBlock Origin here. What this will try to do is when you go to different websites it’s going to try to open up a bunch of different things on you. Some are tracking extensions. It could be if you go to a website a malicious– it could try to put a malicious payload on you. What uBlock Origin is going to try to do is it’s going to try to start blocking unnecessary things from running when you go to a site. As we see here also, it helps with the CPU and memory. So this is blocking quite a number of things. It’s got a pretty small footprint also. And it’s going to instal just like the other ones here.

And then when you go, if you click on this little symbol up here, you could actually see the number of requests that it’s blocking and what it’s blocking. And for whatever reason, if you need to turn it off, you always can click the button here, turn it off. And then you can click this button to refresh the page. And if you want it back on again, all you have to do is click the big power button again. Now, the last one I want to show you is called Netcraft. OK, so I’m going to go in here. I’m going to type in Netcraft extension. And it’s going to be this one here.

So what this programme will do is, it will start rating different websites for us. So I have it installed here. So I’m going to click here. And then it’s going to give us some information about the website that we’re on. So this website, I can see the country is the US. I can see a site rank, who’s hosting it. And if it’s deemed malicious, it’ll actually come up and flag that it’s a malicious website. So that’s going to be pretty handy for safety purposes.