Which extension do I want?
Four, and they do not overlap. Each one answers a different question.
| If the problem is… | Use | What it does | Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sites can tell you switched tabs — videos pause, timers stop, "are you still there?" | Anti-Blur | Makes the page believe it is always focused and visible. | Every plan |
| Ads, trackers, and pages that load slowly | Sodium | Blocks them before the request leaves, tidies what they leave behind, and preloads links you are about to click. | Every plan |
| Sites recognising you between visits even signed out | Argon | Changes the hardware, font and screen details a site reads to identify your browser. | Pro and Max |
| A site's typeface is unreadable, or you want your own | Typeswap | Puts a font of your choosing on any site. | Pro and Max |
They work independently — running all four is fine, and none of them needs the others. What each plan covers.
How they run#
There are two ways, and the second one is not a consolation prize.
The Hub opens a browser with them already loaded#
Download what your plan covers on the Hub's Extensions page and press Open browser. Two things about that are worth knowing, because neither can be engineered away from this side:
That is the Chrome the Hub opened, not the Chrome you already have open. Chrome refuses the debugging protocol on a logged-in profile — it would expose that profile's cookies and saved passwords — so a separate profile is the only configuration Chrome allows. No program can put an extension into the browser you use every day; that is Chrome's rule and it is the right one.
They are loaded fresh each time. An extension loaded this way is not remembered across a restart, so the Hub is what starts that browser, every time. Closing the Hub closes that browser with it.
Or you load one into your own browser#
What no program can do for you, you can do yourself, and Chrome has always allowed it. Every extension the Hub downloads lands as a plain folder on your computer — which is exactly what Chrome's own Load unpacked wants.
- Download the ones you want on the Hub's Extensions page.
- Press How on that page, then Show the folder.
- In your browser open
chrome://extensionsand turn on Developer mode, top right. - Press Load unpacked and choose the folder named after the extension.
That one is yours: it runs on your everyday profile, it survives a restart, and the Hub is not involved. The trade is updates — when the Hub says an update is ready, download it there and press Reload on the extension's card in chrome://extensions.
Downloading never depends on having Chrome open, or installed, or on the Hub's browser running. What arrives is a folder; what you do with it is up to you.
Any Chromium browser
Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Opera all have the same Developer mode and the same Load unpacked button. The extensions are ordinary Chromium extensions and nothing in them checks which browser they are in. Only Chrome is tested, which is a different claim from only Chrome working.
They are not the same as Perch#
Perch is an application, not an extension. It is the one that fences a screen share to a single tab and floats a window on top of your work. The extensions change how a page behaves; Perch changes what the browser hands out.
Perch does install one extension of its own into the Chrome it starts. That one is not in this list and is not optional — it is half of how Perch works, and it is described in How Perch works.
What none of them do#
None of the four sends anything anywhere. There is no account inside an extension, no analytics, and no server to talk to — the entitlement check that lets you install them happens in the Hub, once, before the extension is ever loaded.