What kind of internal Chrome Extensions are companies building?

2 points

5 years ago

To better understand the value of internal browser extensions, we combed through the Chrome Extension store, searching for internal extensions with these keywords in the description: "internal, internal tool, internal company, corporate use, employees of, for * employees." Note: most companies don't publish their internal extensions publicly; their extensions are usually "unlisted."

Here is a summary of the top 100 most interesting internal extensions we found!

Excited to hear your thoughts, are you building internal extensions yourself?

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What problems are developers trying to solve?

- Give employees better access to internal information to do their jobs (custom knowledge base, FAQ search, internal directory)

- Streamline a tedious and/or error-prone browser process

- SaaS doesn't easily surface information that my employees need

- Hosting a frontend for my internal tool is too cumbersome

- Having to context switch to use a certain type of internal tool is not preferable

- My devs need an ad hoc tool (dev tools)

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Breakdown of 100 internal extensions by functionality (Note: these categories are not mutually exclusive.)

knowledge sharing: exposing data in the right context (READ) to remove context switching

19 instances

frontend automations/form filling/take actions

9 instances

UI modification + additional functionality on existing tooling

17 instances

Scraping

3 instances

Integrations used in context (CRUD)

24 instances

developer focused tools: PR/debugging and etc.

14 instances

Internal productivity functionality (credential saving and etc., rather vague)

19 instances

Analytics and tracking

6 instances

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Resources

Airtable of the 100 Chrome Extensions: https://airtable.com/shrz1b4O3lC3Osnj1/tblUrp8Pv1I2IDMpz

Same post with better formatting: https://dev.to/realkevinyang/what-i-learned-from-studying-100-internal-chrome-extensions-a7n