Browser Bits

Chrome extensions for focus, tabs, timers and notes

Time goes somewhere. These are the extensions for the parts of it you'd rather get back: blocking the site you keep reopening, thinning out forty tabs, timing a work block, and writing something down without leaving the page you're on.

20 of 23 are live on a store.

What to look for

A blocker has to see where you're going

Focus Guard, ScreenDiet and Tab Manager declare access to all sites along with tabs and webNavigation, because deciding whether to interrupt a navigation means watching navigations. That is inherent to the job, but it is also the broadest grant on this page, so it is worth reading the permission table before installing — and worth checking how quickly you can switch the extension off once it is in your way.

Find out where the notes live before you write a lot of them

Quick Memo, Web Highlighter, LinkedIn Profile Notes and YouTube Bookmark keep what you write in chrome.storage, tied to that browser profile. A second machine starts empty, and uninstalling takes the contents with it. Look for an export button before you build up a semester of highlights.

Reminders are only as reliable as alarms and your OS

Anything that fires on a schedule runs on the alarms permission, and Chrome enforces a minimum interval and lets the service worker sleep in between, so a scheduled event is approximately on time rather than to the second. Read the permission list to see how far a reminder actually goes: Pomodoro Timer declares alarms and notifications, so it can raise a desktop notification. Holiday D-day and Air Quality Monitor declare alarms but not notifications — they refresh a toolbar badge on a timer and never notify you. Eye Rest Reminder declares alarms too, but the shipped 3.0.2 build has no timer wired up, so its break screen only appears from the popup's Test Now button. Where notifications are involved and nothing shows up, check Chrome's notification permission in your OS settings and whether Focus or Do Not Disturb is on before assuming the extension is broken.

Two extensions on the same surface will fight

Plenty of these inject a control into every page or claim a keyboard shortcut — Scroll to Top, Auto Scroll and Reading Time all add something to the page, and YouTube Enhancer and YouTube Detox both rewrite YouTube. Install one at a time and reload the site you actually care about, because overlapping behaviour usually shows up as a button that appears twice or a shortcut that stops responding.

Questions people ask

Do site blockers actually work?

They work as friction, not as a lock. An extension can put a prompt in front of a site or hide a feed, and you can always turn it off from chrome://extensions — that's true of every blocker, including the ones here. The useful version of the question is whether a few extra seconds is enough to break the reflex, which for a lot of people it is.

Do extensions slow Chrome down?

The cost is proportional to what an extension actually does, and the permission list is the first clue. Quick Memo declares storage and no site access at all, so there is nothing for it to run on a page. Others you drive from a popup still declare more than that — Text Counter and Password Generator both list storage, tabs, webNavigation and access to all sites — and anything with a content script on every site does a small amount of work on every page load. Chrome's own task manager, Shift+Esc, lists extensions separately, which is the direct way to see which one is expensive rather than guessing.

Will my notes and highlights sync to another computer?

Not unless the extension says it does. The note-taking and highlighting extensions here save into local browser storage, so a different computer, a different browser, or a second Chrome profile all start blank. If you need the same notes in two places, pick something with an export and move the file yourself.

Can I stop the notifications without uninstalling?

Yes. Most timer and reminder extensions have an on/off toggle or an interval setting in their own options, which is the least destructive fix. Beyond that you can block notifications for Chrome at the OS level, or disable the extension temporarily from chrome://extensions and re-enable it when you want it back — disabling keeps your saved settings, uninstalling does not.