medium.com 3 min read Original Source

6 Must-Have Safari Extensions

Adi Kakarla

October 26, 2026 · 24 readers

2021 was the year of NFTs.

It was also the year Apple announced Safari extensions on iPadOS.

2 years later, here are some of the best extensions on the App Store.

GoodLinks

I genuinely love GoodLinks.

When I was a debater in high school, it was a powerful research tool. Whenever I had a debate topic to research, I could rely on GoodLinks to be a master database of files.

Now, as an incoming college freshman, it’s a useful tool for saving important links. There’s so much information going around (enrollment times, deadlines, health requirements), and I need an app to store all of this info.

The cool thing about GoodLinks is that you can tag different articles to organize them by category. In other words, you won’t end up with an overwhelming pile of random articles saved in the app.

Grammarly

No, this isn’t an ad lol (I swear I’ve seen the Grammarly ad 10,000 times by this point).

Though ChatGPT and AI might change things, Grammarly is probably the most popular grammar-checker-website-slash-app-thing on the internet.

When I used to use a laptop as my primary device, Grammarly was one of my favorite Safari/Chrome extensions. While it isn’t a game-changing piece of software, it does what it’s supposed to do and does it pretty well.

If you do a lot of writing, it’ll be helpful. And it’s free (though there’s a subscription).

Noir

You haven’t tried real dark mode until you’ve tried a dark mode extension like Noir.

These extensions activate dark mode on any website that doesn’t natively support it. If you’ve ever read an article in Safari at night, you’ll know how annoying this can be.

I don’t have any science to back this, but using these “real dark mode” extensions have made it way easier to read articles and websites at night.

There are many, many, MANY extensions that do this, but Noir appears to be the best. It costs $2.99 (imo an absolute steal), but you can find free apps if you really don’t want to spend any money.

xSearch

xSearch is one of those extensions productivity nerds love because it shaves off a second or two from common, everyday tasks.

xSearch is essentially a “search shortcut” extension. It essentially lets you search websites without having to go to them in the first place.

This is a little confusing, so let me use an example.

Let’s say you’re an Amazon Prime lover. You can set up the text “ama” as a shortcut.

Let’s say that you’re looking for a new iPad. Instead of having to type amazon.com and then using Amazon’s search feature to find an iPad, you can just type “ama iPad” in Safari.

If you’re big on productivity, it’s a steal at $1.99.

StopTheMadness

StopTheMadness is an all-in-one Safari extension that “stops the madness”.

As stated by the developer, it “stops web sites from making your browser harder to use” and “protects your privacy on the web.”

In other words, it turns Safari into a genuinely cool browser.

It removes tracking tags, stops tracking beacons, stops clickjacking, stops videos from autoplaying, automatically skips YouTube ads, lets you replace fonts, lets you add url redirects (Twitter -> Nitter), and way, way more.

It’s a little pricey at $9.99, but it’s worth it if privacy is a big concern for you.

CapitalOne/Honey/CouponBirds

This is the general family of coupon/rewards browser extensions.

Any of these apps are great, though Capital One has the best ratings (4.8/5 stars with 125k reviews) and appears to offer the best features (price comparisons + higher cash back %)

These apps can help you save a ton of money as you shop for everyday products.

These apps are all free with no in-app purchases, so there’s absolutely 0 cost if you choose to use these extensions.