Six Browser Extensions That Respect Your Privacy and Boost Your Workflow

We all want a smoother browsing experience, but too many extensions come with hidden costs—trackers, data collection, and vague privacy policies. The six tools below were recommended by readers and developers, and they share a common thread: they're designed to keep your data on your device. Some are open source, some are auditable, and all of them respect your privacy while making you more productive.

ZebuClip: A Clipboard Manager That Thinks Like You Do

If you spend your workday copying and pasting—and who doesn't?—you know the pain of juggling snippets from emails, docs, and web pages. Most clipboard tools store endless history, but that just creates a mess to sort through later.

ZebuClip takes a different approach. It lets you highlight text on a webpage, copy it with a single click, and see visual cues—like highlights or underlines—so you know what you've already grabbed. You can copy paragraphs, links, images, tables, and more. But here's the kicker: it has a hard limit on how many items you can hold, forcing you to export or clear them when the list fills up. That might sound annoying, but it keeps your clipboard from becoming a digital landfill.

When you're ready to use what you've collected, you can paste everything as plain text, Markdown, or rich text—or batch-copy the entire list. You can also export to TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, or Markdown files. And if you're into automating your workflow, ZebuClip can send individual or batch items to apps like Flomo, Notion, Obsidian, and Logseq via API or URL schemes.

ZebuClip is free with a Pro tier, available on the Chrome and Edge stores.

OpenCookie: A Cookie Editor You Can Actually Trust

Developers and power users often need to inspect or tweak cookies—maybe to test a login flow or reproduce a bug. Browser dev tools work, but they're clunky. The usual solution is a cookie editor extension, but here's the uncomfortable truth: cookies are the keys to your online accounts. Hand them to a random extension, and you're handing over the locksmith's toolkit.

That's why one developer built OpenCookie. It's open source, with no build step—meaning the code you see on GitHub is exactly what runs in your browser. It's designed around three principles: zero data upload (no servers, no tracking, no analytics), minimal permissions (you grant access to a site only when you need it), and a tiny codebase you can read yourself.

The feature set covers the basics: view all cookies for a tab, add/edit/delete, search and filter, JSON import/export, and a light/dark theme. Nothing fancy, but it does what it promises without selling you out.

Lumno: A Spotlight-Style Search Bar for Your Browser

If you've ever used Arc or Raycast, you know the appeal of a command palette that puts everything a keystroke away. Lumno brings that to Chrome and other Chromium browsers. It's a focused search tool that can find bookmarks, history, and top sites—so you actually use those bookmarks you've been hoarding. It can also jump to browser pages like downloads or settings, and even search within specific sites by typing a trigger word and hitting Tab.

But Lumno goes further. It can send prompts directly to AI web apps like Gemini or GPT, and it has a window switcher for hopping between recent tabs (Alt/Option + Q). The new tab page includes a search box, a bookmark bar, and a recently visited section, all with customizable themes and wallpapers.

Privacy-wise, Lumno runs locally, uses GPL-3.0 open source, and only syncs settings via chrome.storage.sync. It doesn't collect or sell your browsing history, bookmarks, or page text. It needs permissions to work, but they're used solely for generating search results and displaying new tab content.

E2N: One-Click Web Clipping Straight to Your Notes

Everyone who does research online knows the pain of copying a long article and having the formatting fall apart in your notes. Or trying to capture a key moment from a video tutorial while pausing and switching windows. E2N (Everything to Notebook) aims to fix that.

Right-click any webpage and choose "Clip this page," and E2N strips out the sidebar, ads, and clutter, leaving clean text and images. It's optimized for Chinese platforms like Zhihu, preserving source URLs and converting formulas to LaTeX. For Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), you can plug in an AI API for OCR to extract both images and text.

Videos are where E2N really shines. If a Bilibili or YouTube tutorial has subtitles, it extracts them in seconds. If not, it can transcribe audio via your own API key. The content can then be pushed to Obsidian (via Local REST API), Notion, Feishu, or NotebookLM—no cloud intermediary, and your data never touches E2N's servers.

It's a lightweight tool, not a full-fledged read-it-later service. No accounts, no sync, no cloud. Just a shovel for digging content out of the web and planting it in your knowledge base.

SubMask: Learn a Language by Hiding the Subtitles

Watching shows in a foreign language is a classic way to improve listening comprehension. But if you're reading subtitles in your native language, your brain takes the easy path—you read what's fastest, which is usually your mother tongue. That defeats the purpose. Ideally, you'd turn off subtitles entirely, but many streaming platforms don't let you hide just the subtitles.

SubMask is a free Chrome/Edge extension that covers subtitles with a stylish mask—like Apple's Liquid Glass effect—so you can't read them, but the video remains visible. You can position the mask with a one-click snap, and press H to temporarily reveal subtitles when you're stuck, then go back a few seconds to rewatch. There's even a mouse-passthrough mode that makes the mask disappear when you hover, so you can adjust the progress bar without obstruction.

The developer tested it while watching Young Sheldon Season 7, and it's been a hit with language learners. Available on GitHub and the Edge add-on store.

只译 (Only Translate): Bilingual Reading for Web, Video, and EPUBs

Reading foreign-language articles can be tiring when every word needs translating in your head. 只译 (built on the FluentRead extension) offers a "smart mode" that identifies the main content of a page—articles, blog posts, comments—and translates only that, leaving navigation and buttons alone. You can view translations side-by-side or just the translation.

It also translates video subtitles in real-time for YouTube, Udemy, Coursera, and Khan Academy, with context-aware segmentation and caching to avoid lag. And if you read local EPUBs, 只译 includes a built-in reader that supports bilingual display, bookmarks, and progress tracking. It doesn't upload your files—except for the text that's sent to the translation service you choose.

Translation services range from free options like Microsoft and Google to AI APIs like DeepL, OpenAI, and Claude. The extension itself is free and open source, with no account required.

Bottom Line

These six extensions prove that you don't have to sacrifice privacy for utility. Whether you're a developer, a researcher, or a language learner, there's something here that can make your browser work harder for you—without snooping on you. And if you know of a great privacy-respecting extension we missed, drop a comment below.