What do you do when your favorite Chrome extension stops working or gets pulled from the Chrome Web Store by its author or Google? While you could hope that the developer posts an update eventually - at least in the first case scenario, you are left with looking for alternatives in the second.

While you could now head over to the Chrome Web Store to frantically search for related terms in hope of finding a suitable alternative, you could also make use of the store's related feature instead. Please note that this only works for extensions still listed in the store. If you see the following or a similar error message in the store, you need to work around the issue first.

Finding Related Chrome Extensions

If that happens, you need to find a similar extension first, before you can open the related suggestions in the store.

There are two options to display related extensions in the Chrome store. You can append /related to any extension address of the store to display the related extensions this way, or click on the related tab when the extension is already open in the store.

Google displays a total of 12 related extensions on this page, and while results are sometimes way off, they often highlight at least a few extensions that are indeed similar to the selected extension.

Like in the store listings, you can hover over the extensions to read the short description, open the extension's profile page in the store, or install the Chrome extension right away in the browser. A list of extensions from the same developer is also displayed on the page. This can actually be sometimes helpful, for instance when the developer stopped development of the old extension to release a new extension with a similar functionality under a different name.

Closing Words

Have you used the related extensions feature in the Chrome store? I personally would like to see the related feature be available in the store even for removed extensions.

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