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All year, developers from around the world build Chrome extensions that make browsing easier, more productive and more personalized — whether you’re on the web to work, learn, play or all of the above. Today, we’re sharing our favorite extensions of the year that help people continue to virtually stay connected, get things done and have some fun along the way. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Communicate and collaborate

Whether you’re working from the office, your couch or a bit of both, extensions can help keep you connected with your teammates. Loom makes it easier to capture and share videos with others, while Mote allows you to give quick feedback through voice commenting and transcripts. Wordtune also helps you clearly communicate by rephrasing sentences and catching typos in emails and documents.

Stay productive

Other extensions offer new ways to stay focused and efficient. Forest gamifies productivity through virtual tree planting and rewards, and Dark Reader protects your eyes (and sleep schedule) during long workdays. Tab Manager Plus also saves you from drowning in a sea of never-ending tabs, and Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder makes it easier to quickly screenshot and record content to share across platforms.

Learn virtually

With education happening online more than ever before, students and teachers need helpful virtual classroom tools. Kami creates an interactive online learning space for students and teachers, and InsertLearning helps you easily take notes and integrates with Google Classroom. Meanwhile, Toucan makes learning a new language fun and immersive, and Rememberry organizes vocabulary words into flashcard decks for quick studying throughout the day.

Make (and save) some change

To give your browsing experience a personal twist, Stylus helps you build and install custom themes and skins for your favorite sites. And Rakuten puts cash back in your pocket by automatically finding coupons and deals across the web — particularly helpful during one of the busiest years for online shopping.

To install and learn more about these extensions, visit our Chrome Web Store Favorites of 2021 collection. And if you’re a developer looking for tips to design a high-quality Chrome extension, check out our best practices.

As of 2020, Brazil continues to lead the world in primary forest loss with an increase of 25% year over year. In the Amazon, the clear-cut deforestation rate is at its highest in over 10 years. Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) is a Brazilian nonprofit founded in 1994 to promote solutions to this crisis and other social and environmental issues. With a focus on the defense of the environment, cultural heritage, and human rights, ISA promotes solutions for indigenous peoples and other traditional communities in Brazil.

Watch this short documentary about their impact, how they use drone footage and Google Earth to prevent deforestation, and learn more about the role of indigenous communities in protecting local forests and biodiversity.

For golfer Tom Watson, seeing never-before published images of himself during the 1981 Masters brought back vivid memories of the important moments that led to his victory that year. For Gannett, being able to publish the video interview with Watson was part of a three-way editorial partnership between USA TODAY, Golfweek and the Augusta Chronicle, made possible with many never-before seen images that were curated from the Chronicle’s 30+ years of Masters photo archives.

All three titles are part of Gannett, which partnered with the Google News Initiative (GNI) to comb through their network archives for valuable but untapped visual assets to digitize and make available for present use through Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES). Gannett mined the Masters images from the archives of the Augusta Chronicle, which were part of 40,000+ images IMES digitized from several properties across Gannett, including The Chronicle, Detroit Free Press, the Tennessean and USA TODAY. Gannett and GNI teamed up with IMES to securely transport the assets from multiple Gannett photo archives to IMES’s climate-controlled facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Once there, the IMES team digitized them using high-resolution image capture technology.

This project further extends a multi-dimensional partnership that has been in place for over a decade between Google and Gannett. One of the primary goals was to create new editorial content from recently digitized images unlocked from analog libraries, much of which has never been seen before. Gannett used this rediscovered editorial content to drive additional audience and subscribers to various publications. The material will also allow for expanded revenue through traffic-based advertising, sponsorship or syndication channels such as Gannett’s in-house image licensing team at Imagn.com.

One of our challenges, and one likely shared by many legacy publishers, was finding materials from the archives that were in good shape and had supporting research materials. We had to carefully select visual assets that survived mergers and physical building moves, while rejecting materials that were not preserved over time. Doing this due diligence before embarking on the digitization process is important to ensure efforts are being put towards material that will have value and organization.

The variety of archival material that was digitized in this project allowed Gannett to experiment with several different content strategies at various properties. As a publisher, Gannett is pushing towards a subscription-based model for all of its media outlets, with aggressive growth goals. The Masters archival material offered us the opportunity to examine readership trends in content at different properties, with some being subscription-based and others being free to the public. This digitized material also allows Gannett to respond quickly to news where it is relevant to current-day events. An example of where we used these archival images was the recent death of groundbreaking Black golfer Lee Elder, using images through a gallery in Elder’s obituary.

Early in their transition to a subscription model, the Detroit Free Press used a similar strategy of mixing subscriber-only content with some that was open to the broader public. They drew both significant traffic and drove consumer subscription conversions using this archival material. A story looking back at the details of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Detroit with some of the archival photos was published as a subscriber-only exclusive that drove new subscriptions. The broader gallery page of archival images was open to the public and drew more 100,000 page views. A reader survey conducted on existing subscribers showed that 37% had read the piece on the Free Press’ site, and more than 50% of those felt that they would enjoy seeing more content like this in the Free Press.

Our next steps involve identifying ongoing editorial opportunities where we can use this material. Gannett will also use artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies from Google Cloud Platform to uncover more opportunities to monetize content. The Masters material in particular offers a yearly opportunity to create “from the archives” types of content experiences where we can resurface rarely or never-before-seen images and develop new storylines. Within Gannett, this future content can be created and cross-promoted at local (Augusta), national (USA TODAY) and sports specialty (Golfweek) levels, giving this material far greater reach beyond that of any single publication.

There’s more streaming entertainment than ever — and if you want to watch it all, the cost of subscriptions can add up quickly. In fact, our research showed that 67% of TV streamers are concerned about how much they’ll pay for streaming in the future.

With Google TV, you don’t have to limit your watchlist — or break the bank. Just in time for the holidays, here are a few ways you can watch more, for less, with Google TV in the U.S.

1. Watch free live, linear streaming TV channels on the Live tab. Starting today, we’re partnering with Pluto TV so you can access more than 300 free live TV channels on Google TV. Visit the Live tab to see what’s on now or check out the Free Live TV recommendations in the For You tab. This new integration with Pluto TV will be available on all Google TV devices in the coming weeks.
2. Check out movies on YouTube. Access thousands of feature-length movies for free with ads from the Movies & Shows tab in the YouTube app. Don’t miss holiday favorites like “Jingle All The Way,” “Serendipity” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
3. Try out more free Google TV apps. Head on over to the Apps tab to find a row of “Free movies & TV” apps to download, including Tubi, Xumo and Red Bull TV.
4. Enjoy six months of Peacock Premium, at no extra cost. For a limited time, when you activate a new Google TV (or other Android TV OS device) in the U.S., you can get Peacock Premium at no extra cost. (After that, it’s $4.99 a month plus tax, but you can cancel at any time — check out all the details for more information.) You’ll get everything Peacock has to offer — hit movies and shows, exclusive originals, WWE, live sports and more. Visit the For You or Apps tab after you set up your device to redeem the offer.
5. Redeem Google Play Points for movies, shows, apps and more. If the movie or TV show you’re looking for isn’t available from your services or free providers, you can rent or buy over 200,000 movies and TV episodes directly from Google TV, starting at $2.99. Whether it’s a new release or an old favorite, just search for it with your voice and click “Rent.” And with the Play Points loyalty program, you can earn points for every dollar you spend and redeem them for free Play Credits, which you can use to buy more movies, shows, books, apps and games.

And in 2022, we’ll be bringing you more ways to watch for free. In the meantime, kick back with free live TV, premium shows from Peacock and on demand movies on your Chromecast with Google TV and TVs from Sony andTCL.