Chrome VPN add ons: where they stop working for you

Chrome VPN add ons send the traffic of one browser through a server run by the add-on's publisher. Nothing else on the computer is touched. Your mail program, a game launcher and the operating system's update service keep using your ordinary connection. If a browser is the only thing you want covered, that can be enough. If you expected the whole machine to be wrapped up, it will not be.

Chrome lets extensions change its proxy settings. A VPN add-on uses that door: it tells the browser to hand every request to a remote server first. The add-on does not build a network adapter or touch the system, which is why it installs in seconds and needs no administrator password. There is a trade in this. The price of that convenience is permission to read and change pages on the sites you visit, because the same settings door sits next to the page-reading one.

The three words are used loosely. Chrome calls them extensions, Firefox calls them add-ons, and older pages still say plugin. For a VPN the difference does not matter much: all of them are small programs that live inside the browser and can only act on what the browser does. That limit is the reason this page keeps coming back to the edge of the window: whatever the name on the store listing, the add-on lives inside Chrome and ends there.

Chrome can sync extensions between machines when you sign in with a Google account, so an add-on you fitted on one computer may appear on another. That is handy, and it also means a forgotten add-on follows you around. Open the extensions page now and then and remove what you do not use. Each one keeps its permissions for as long as it stays installed, whether you open it or not.

Short, one-off jobs. Checking how a page looks from another country, or reaching a site from a borrowed laptop where you cannot install programs. In those cases the quick install is a real advantage, and you remove the add-on when you finish. For daily browsing on your own machine, a client that covers the whole system is the steadier choice, and it does not need to read your pages.

Royal Key sells a VPN key, so it has an interest in the answer to a question like this one. The page draws on our own setup and on what is generally known about browsers and proxies. Check any publisher you consider in the same way, whoever wrote the advice.