Enhance Google Plus With These 10 Essential Chrome Extensions
10 best Google Chrome Extensions for all the Google+ users out there! Try them all to enhance your Google+ experience.
Google+ (Google Plus), now in field trial and is an invite-only social network project by Google. Within weeks after its first launch, it has attracted over 10 million users and 1 billion items being shared per day. Though Google is yet to release an API for Google+ but many developers have already developed extensions for enhancing the user-interface of the social network project. The list of extensions, plugins and userscripts are not limited to Google Chrome only. This article is a summary of the best 10 Google+ extensions available for Google+ users. These best Google+ Chrome extensions improves overall interaction, navigation, sharing and social interactions for a richer experience.
How to add these Google Chrome extensions?
Just click on the names of the extensions we have covered here. You will be taken to their respective Chrome web store page. Click on the big blue Install button to install them. To manage the extensions, simply click on the spanner icon (Tools) than under Tools, click on Extensions. You can directly visit the extensions page by typing chrome://extensions
in the address bar and pressing Enter.
Best 10 Google Chrome Extensions for Google+ (Google Plus) users.
Google+ Stream displays all the messages from people in your Circles (if it is shared with you). But sometimes, you may not be able to cope up with the information overload, caused by the real-time updates of comments under the message. G+me for Google Plus solves this problem by collapsing the messages. It is great enhancement to work with real-time large stream of messages and comments. Other notable enhancements it brings to Google+ are:
- Notification status visible at all times: Browser icon shows badge with number of new notifications.
- Collapsible comments: Always-visible button makes 100s of comments easy to hide.
- Collapsible posts: An alternative to muting, this is great if you’re not interested in seeing a post but still want to get back to it later and/or still want to get notifications.
- Real-time comment count on collapsed items: Track the number of seen or unseen comments, whether you like to collapse posts and comments.
- Mark comments as read: Collapsing posts/comments automatically keeps track of comments you’ve seen; the extension remembers.
- List-mode option keeps at most one post displayed: This turns the stream into a dashboard.
- Mouse-over instant preview: In list mode, hover the mouse over a collapsed post to get a fully functional preview on the side.
Usability Boost for Google Plus
Usability Boost for Google+ is a Chrome extension that makes small CSS changes to the user interface. These changes help you put your focus on the content, separating visually posts and comments. It keeps the Google Notification bar at a fixed place on top. So, even when you’re scrolling down the page, you’ll never miss a notification again. For more convenience, it displays a direct link to mute post. The extension makes the following changes that are visible right away:
- A grey background that substitute the white one and create a nice contrast between the post and the background
- A little spacing between post to clearly difference them
- A blue background in comments, like Facebook
- The likes are highlighted with a white background and red letters
- A direct link to Mute posts
It also offer three options that you can disable/enable from the extension option’s menu: Fixed Top Bar, Grey background and Direct access to mute link.
Native GMail for Google Plus is a Google Plus extension for Google Chrome browser that adds email notifications next to your Google username on the Google navigation bar. It shows total number of new emails received, when you click on the notification, a drop down list appears with details about the email(s) received. The email notifications only appears on your Google+ page and not on any other Google service page. Using the extension’s option you can set how soon it should check for new emails and if it should keep checking even when you aren’t on your Google+ page.
Google Plus Bar Minus extension is useful for those Google+ users who wants to disable or hide the black Google navigation bar on their Google+ page. Using a single click on the extension you can turn on or off the Google navigation bar. Just turn off the black Google+ nav bar to get more real estate on the screen. This extension will be useful for everyone who are using the various notification extensions featured on this article.
+Comment Toggle is a good and useful Google Plus extension for Google Chrome browser. It helps you hide comments to posts within your Stream and when you actually want to see them you can toggle the option. Like G+me (which we have covered above), this plugin automatically hides all comments on a post.
This extension tweaks Chrome search and lets you share on Twitter. Helper gives you desktop notifications for new Google+ posts as pop-up window or an audio alert. The extension offers the following enhancements to Google Plus:
- Share Google+ Posts with people on twitter.
- Translate posts with Google Translate to language specified by you.
- Notifier – Get desktop notifications on new posts, also with sound. (mouse over notification to freeze it).
- Bookmark Google+ posts for reading them later.
- Bookmark posts on Delicious.
- Linked hashtags in posts for better search.
- Search in Google+ posts and profiles directly from your omnibox (address box), just type the search keyword “plus” (excluding the quotes) and type your search query.
+Photo Zoom is another very handy Google Plus extension for Chrome which enables image zooming on mouse over. +Photo Zoom provides fast and simple zooming for photos within your Google+ Stream. Just hover over the image you wish to zoom and +Photo Zoom will load the enlarged version of the picture saving you extra clicks to view them.
Search Extension for Google Plus
This extension enables you to search Google Plus public contents online. The extension can filter profiles, posts, posts from Buzz and posts from Google Reader. The results page is neatly arranged into tabs featuring all results, results from Google+ posts, profiles, Google Buzz and Google Reader.
GTools+ is a Chrome extension that adds many useful features to Google Plus. Using this extension you can: stick the Google bar fixed at the top when you scroll down, translate foreign language posts, customize the notification color, change Google Chat place, add notification for Gmail and Reader and more. In all, the extension provides the following Google+ enhancements:
- Unified Google bar, your personalized menu is possible on all Google services.
- Stick the Google+ bar always on top when you scrolling.
- Prevent open in new tab or window when you click on link inside the Google+ bar.
- Change the position of the chat for put in the Google+ Bar.
- Change the color of the notification bubble in the Google+ Bar.
- Right click on the extension icon for go to the options page fastest.
- Add a translation link in the context menu (auto detect the post language).
- Add notification for Gmail and Reader in the Google Bar.
- Edit the color of any notification bubble.
Surplus extension allows you to easily access all your notifications, create new posts from any website. The best thing is you can do all these actions without even switching to Google site. Just click on the extension’s icon present beside the address bar of Chrome to get access to all these features. The enhancements offered by the Surplus extension are:
- Post or respond from within the pop-up of the extension.
- Desktop Notifications with notification sounds.
- Switch between multiple Google accounts.
We hope you found our compilation as useful as we have ourselves. Do you use any other extension or userscript? Share it with us, we will love to test it.
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