How to Install Chrome Extensions in Android Browser
If you’ve ever sat at your laptop or desktop and wondered why you can’t use all of your fun browser extensions on your smartphone, you must be a Chrome user. Firefox fans have been able to install extensions for the Android version of the browser for some time, but this feature has not yet made its way into the official version of Chrome.
Instead, I recommend checking out an alternative browser – based of course on Chromium – which gives you everyone familiar with Chrome with the (recently added) bonus of being able to use extensions with your mobile browser. I’m talking about Kiwi Browser and here’s how to get started unlocking extension support.
First, install a browser (it has built-in ad blocking if you need a little encouragement to get started). While you’ve had to fiddle with internal Kiwi options in previous versions of the app, extension support is built in and included in the latest version I checked (Phi).
When the new browser tab loads, click on the three dots icon in the upper right corner. Find “Extensions” and tap that. You will see blah blah blah about the Kiwi Web Store, which is actually just a hyperlink to the good old Chrome Web Store, which should be familiar to anyone who has installed the extension on the desktop browser.
And no, the site is not formatted to work with mobile devices, as Google assumes that you will never need to visit it from your smartphone.
As far as the extensions you should try using in Kiwi, this is where the process gets a little tricky. First, every extension I downloaded and installed initially threw an error message that said they could not be installed, which doesn’t seem to be accurate.
More importantly, not all extensions are guaranteed to work in your mobile browser. I found that, for example, most of the ” new tab ” extensions I tried to enable completely failed. And I have never been able to get the Save in Pocket extension to do anything, only ever opened a blank new tab page for my efforts.
I was pleased to see that Ublock Origin was working perfectly, and my experiments ended there – mainly because I was tired of dealing with a desktop website for the Chrome Web Store.
However far you want to go down the rabbit hole “Does it work?” with your mobile chrome extensions is up to you. To find and access installed extensions, you need to click on the three-dot icon in the upper right corner of the Kiwi browser and scroll to the very bottom of the menu. You will find all your extensions there (I assume the mobile equivalent of toolbar icons).