DEMO: Browser Add-Ons and Extensions

One thing that I really like is a dark theme, and there's been lots of programs in the past that really haven't had a dark theme. So what I've done is I found some sort of extension or add-on that I could install to bring dark theme into, for instance, Google Docs, and it's an extension that's added to Chrome.

Why Extensions Exist

Google is a huge company, but they can't think of everything. Not to mention, to a certain degree, they want others to succeed. So what we have is they want to encourage people to make add-ons, make features, make things that integrate into Chrome that work together. Think of a puzzle: we can actually take this other program and incorporate it into Chrome to give Chrome extra features. Those are extensions and add-ons.

Managing Extensions in Chrome

If I look right here, in fact it looks like a puzzle piece right here, and it says extensions. We're going to click on that, and we're going to see that Adobe Acrobat is an example of that. In one of my prior lessons I downloaded Adobe Acrobat so that way we could read PDFs, and it installed this extension on this browser.

Let's just click on manage extensions. We can also see Google Docs offline, so that way, if I maybe have a laptop and I take it with me, then I can actually save my Google Docs — it's not just in the cloud. So these are two extensions that are turned on on this computer.

What I can do is, number one, I can disable them. Sometimes I might not want these features to be on. I might not want to get rid of it, but I just might not want it to be on right now. Or I can turn them on, or I can remove them. I can look at details, or I could actually go and search for other extensions to add to this list.

The Chrome Web Store

So I've got the Chrome Web Store here, where I could discover other extensions. I'm going to click on Chrome Web Store. One of the things that I mentioned is that I like things to be on the dark side, and my Google Docs for the longest time didn't have that capability of dark mode. So I could type in here Google Docs dark mode. There's dark mode Google Docs, so there's an example of it, and I think this is the actual one that I installed, the Google Docs dark mode. So I click on it and then I would add this to Chrome, and then this would allow me to go into dark mode with my documents. So that was an extension that I used in the past.

It's got some sort of rating here, so we can see how well this is rated. But there's a lot of different extensions out there that we could actually add to this browser and give it extra features.