You Have 47 Chrome Extensions Installed. You Can Never Find the One You Need.
You're in the middle of a focused writing session. The page feels slow. You open a new tab and something in the corner is injecting a toolbar you haven't used in six months. You open chrome://extensions to disable it, scroll past 40 other icons, and by the time you find it, you've lost the thread of what you were writing.
That's not a rare edge case. For anyone running more than fifteen extensions, that's a Tuesday.
The Three Things You've Tried That Don't Actually Work
Most developers and power users have landed on one of these approaches. None of them hold up.
The real cost isn't wasted time. It's the fact that you pay it over and over.
Workaround one: The Chrome extensions page. You bookmark chrome://extensions and treat it like a control panel. In practice, you scroll through a wall of icons in alphabetical order, find the toggle, disable it, and close the tab. Then repeat the same process when you need it back. There's no concept of context. Every toggle is its own trip.
Workaround two: Just leave everything enabled. This is what most people settle on eventually. The extensions are there, they're on, and the browser is measurably slower — especially with memory-heavy tools like Grammarly, LastPass, and Lighthouse all running at once on every tab. You don't know which one is responsible because Chrome gives you no per-extension data.
Workaround three: Multiple Chrome profiles. You create a "dev" profile and a "writing" profile. It works until you need a bookmark from the other profile, or you're on a video call and the wrong profile is open. Maintaining two sets of logins, history, and settings becomes its own job.
| Workaround | What Actually Happens | The Real Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome's extensions page | Scroll, find, toggle, repeat for every context switch | You manually disable and re-enable the same 8 extensions every day |
| Leave all extensions on | Browser carries full load regardless of what you're doing | Page loads slow down; you don't know which extension is responsible |
| Separate Chrome profiles | Each profile needs its own logins, bookmarks, and maintenance | One forgotten credential means 20 minutes of account recovery |
| The consistent failure across all three: none of them remember what you were doing. You're always starting from scratch. |
What the Same Workday Looks Like With Extension Manager
You open your laptop at 8:45 AM to write documentation. You click the "Writing" group in Extension Manager. Grammarly, Hemingway, and your dictionary extension switch on. Your React DevTools, Wappalyzer, and JSON formatter switch off. The browser is lighter. You notice it immediately. At 11:00 AM, you switch to a pull request review. One click on "Dev Tools." Your linting helpers, the GitHub file navigator, and your accessibility checker are back on. Your writing tools are off. You didn't open a single settings page. At 2:30 PM, your browser feels sluggish on a client's site. You open Extension Manager's performance view and see that one extension is consuming 340 MB of RAM on that specific page. You disable it. The page snaps back. You didn't need to restart Chrome or guess. At 4:15 PM, you need a specific extension you installed three weeks ago and haven't touched since. You type three letters in the Extension Manager search bar. It surfaces immediately. You enable it, do the task, disable it again in under ten seconds. Before / After: Switching from dev mode to writing mode Before:
- Open
chrome://extensionsin a new tab - Scroll through 40+ icons and toggle off each dev tool individually — then toggle on each writing tool After:
- Click the "Writing" group in Extension Manager
- Every dev tool disables and every writing tool enables at once That's the shift. Not conceptually — literally. The actions you take go from eight to two.
Final Takeaway
If you've ever sat at your browser feeling vaguely annoyed without knowing which extension is causing it, Extension Manager is worth installing before you open another tab.
Try Extension Manager
You open chrome://extensions to disable one tool and end up losing two minutes and your train of thought. Extension Manager puts every extension into groups you define — switch your entire dev set off and your writing set on in one click, from a single dashboard.
Try Extension Manager →