Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
What kind of internal Chrome Extensions are companies building?
2 points by kkevv 1974 days 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?

------

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)

------

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

------

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