If you’re a Chrome user, you could be slowing down your browsing experience without realizing! Knowing what to download can feel like a minefield, but there are some extensions that add seriously useful features and functionality.

With cybercrime still posing a huge threat for personal users and businesses alike, being prudent is always worth it. To save you the time and effort of extensive research, we’ve compiled a list of helpful Chrome extensions that could genuinely improve your safety and convenience online.

Password managers

Multi-faceted security is the only way to go if you’re frequently spending money or using debit cards online. Alongside multi-factor authentication, using password managers will help you to bolster your personal security strategy.

There are a few reputable password managers on the Chrome store and Keeper Security is one of the best. It comes highly rated on the web store and offers improved security while you browse. Prices start from under $3 per month for personal users, but you can still install a free version to try across your devices. It’s an excellent way to keep your passwords locked down.

Ad blockers

Do you ever find your online experience plagued by annoying pop-ups and adverts? If so, using an ad blocker could help to streamline your shopping and gaming, giving you uninterrupted content and a more peaceful time online.

There are several ad blockers to choose from, but we recommend trying uBlock Origin. This not only stops adverts in their tracks but prevents malware sites and trackers from sourcing your browsing data. It’s also free, and it doesn’t demand much from your computer either, allowing other programs to run efficiently.

With custom filters and blockers, you can take control of your browsing.

VPN extensions

If you ever worry about the security of your online transactions or having your data harvested while you’re gaming online, then using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) could be essential for safeguarding your online lifestyle.

These extensions offer a secure, encrypted tunnel for all your internet activity, allowing you to effectively appear as another user. This protects your identity and details from trackers and malicious actors. Using an approved VPN Chrome extension is a brilliant way to browse safely without installing data-heavy software.

Grammar tools

If you’re doing important work on your computer, you need to be taken seriously! From direct messaging on gaming apps to formal emails for work, good spelling and grammar is imperative.

Along with upholding your own standards for quality and accuracy, grammar extension tools like Grammarly allow you to write impressively well. This writing assistant is powered by AI and offers real-time suggestions for wording and punctuation, enhancing both your tone and vocabulary. For any message across any platform, it’s a no-brainer.

To download these extensions or find out more about them first, simply head over to the Chrome Web Store.

If you want to know how cryptocurrencies actually make new coins or check if a transaction is real, it all comes down to “mining” and “minting.” Seriously, they’re the engine room. While they both exist to keep the blockchain ticking over, everything else—from the way they work, to how much power they suck up, and who gets paid—is totally different. Mining is the high-stakes computational race where you burn electricity to win. Minting? That’s way chiller. It just relies on who owns what tokens or follows a set of pre-agreed rules to create new stuff. Getting these differences straight is the first step to figuring out why some projects use one method and others choose the alternative.

The whole crypto world has seriously evolved, forcing everyone to look past the old, energy-hungry “proof-of-work” mining. That’s why we’ve seen this massive shift to “proof-of-stake” and a bunch of clever mash-up models that just run way cleaner. This transition explains exactly why minting is everywhere now: it lets chains move fast, be super efficient, and not leave a gigantic carbon mess. When developers are scrambling to handle huge volumes of users and regular folks just want something easier to get involved with, the distinction between mining and minting stops being a technical detail—it becomes absolutely vital for deciding where to invest your money, how secure a network really is, and whether the whole thing will even last long-term.

How Mining Works in Proof-of-Work Systems

Look, “mining” is what we all think of first—it’s the classic Bitcoin way, running on what they call “proof-of-work” networks. This is where some seriously expensive hardware races to crack complex crypto puzzles just to create a new chunk of data. Yeah, the whole thing demands an absolutely huge amount of electricity, no argument there, but that’s actually why it’s so secure!

Since you need specialized gear that costs a fortune, it makes total sense that mining tends to clump together in places where energy is dirt cheap. This clustering is a big problem for decentralization, which is the whole thing newer blockchains desperately wanted to fix. Plus, the costs for all that hardware, the massive cooling bills, and maintenance are constantly going up, basically kicking the little guys right out of the market. These big, annoying issues are precisely why we saw that huge pivot to alternative systems—the ones where minting completely replaced mining. That switch knocked down all the barriers to entry and allowed networks to grow participation without having to burn down the entire power grid.

How Minting Works in Proof-of-Stake and Beyond

Minting is the beating heart of all the new proof-of-stake systems. It’s how the network decides who gets to validate transactions—it literally chooses based on how many tokens you hold, not who has the biggest, loudest computer setup. Instead of racing to crack impossible math puzzles, participants simply secure the network by locking up their assets, and new blocks are created right on time based on that locked amount. Since minting isn’t relying on energy-hungry hardware, it means everything is faster, block creation is totally predictable, and the environmental impact is dramatically lower. That fantastic efficiency is exactly what’s driving global adoption and why proof-of-stake is a perfect fit for decentralized apps that need to handle massive traffic.

But wait, there’s more! “Minting” also refers to simply creating new tokens or even those super-popular NFTs. When you, the user, decide to generate a digital asset, the act of minting is what permanently locks that item onto the blockchain, assigning full ownership and all its details. This system is the backbone for all our Web3 identity systems, in-game economies, digital art sales, branded collectibles, and even turning real-world assets into tokens. As tech innovation continues to spill into every industry, minting is becoming an absolutely crucial mechanism for new forms of ownership, community building, and generating revenue.

Economic Incentives: Mining Rewards vs. Minting Rewards

The cash rewards from mining completely rely on three things: how fast your gear is, what you pay for electricity, and how hard the network makes the puzzle. Those initial entry costs are so high that it usually limits participation, making mining really only a game for industrial operations with huge piles of money. This whole model works if a network’s main goal is maximum security through massive spending, but it’s just impractical for everyday people who want a simpler, cheaper way to help out. The financial risk is also always bouncing around, especially when your hardware becomes junk overnight or power prices suddenly shoot up.

Minting rewards, on the flip side, are open to a ton more people because the process relies on owning tokens instead of buying crazy expensive equipment. Validators earn rewards based on how much they’ve staked, which really pushes people to commit for the long haul and keeps the network super stable. Since you don’t need any specialized hardware, individuals with even modest funds can genuinely participate and make a difference in the ecosystem. To keep everyone honest, a lot of networks throw in penalties like “slashing” or “lock-up” periods—it’s basically accountability that adds financial incentives for good behavior and makes the security better through true decentralization. Minting is definitely the go-to model for sustainable growth as more chains try new ways to reward participants.

Choosing Between Mining and Minting

The whole decision between mining and minting really comes down to what a network cares about most. Proof-of-work is still the ultimate gold standard for security because of how hard those computations are—that makes it perfect for something like Bitcoin, which prioritizes being totally unchangeable and impossible to attack. But, its massive environmental footprint and increasing costs are shoving tons of new projects toward alternatives. Networks built around minting usually get faster speeds, lower fees, and are just way easier to access, which is absolutely vital if you want mass adoption, applications that people actually want to use, and real-world integration.

For you, the user, the decision is usually based on your investment goals, how much risk you can handle, and how comfortable you are with the tech side of things. People who know hardware or have access to cheap electricity might still gravitate toward mining, while others find staking and minting way simpler, cheaper, and more predictable. As the crypto landscape keeps growing, the distinctions between mining and minting will keep shaping all the tech trends, economic models, and the entire future of decentralized networks. Honestly, both approaches bring something totally unique to the ecosystem, and getting a handle on their roles helps everyone—users and developers alike—handle this complex digital world.

Microsoft’s decision to scale back sales quotas for its Foundry AI platform has become an early sign of friction inside a global AI market that is racing ahead technologically but still struggling to secure the kind of broad enterprise adoption that investors and developers have been betting on.

The move, which contributed to a more than 2% slide in Microsoft’s stock on Wednesday, followed a report that many Azure sales teams failed to meet Foundry growth goals last fiscal year — an uncommon recalibration for a company known for sticking to ambitious revenue targets.

Foundry, an Azure service designed for building and managing autonomous AI agents capable of executing multi-step tasks with minimal oversight, was supposed to complement the surge in demand driven by generative AI and cloud-based model deployment. Yet fewer than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit reached Foundry’s 50% growth target, according to The Information.

Another team originally tasked with doubling Foundry sales also fell short, prompting Microsoft to lower its quota to the same 50% threshold. Those misses stand out in a year when Microsoft aggressively expanded its AI footprint across enterprise software, infrastructure, and developer tools.

The softened targets underline a broader pattern across the AI sector. While the global market for AI infrastructure has exploded — powered by demand for advanced chips, large-language models, and high-performance training clusters — many traditional businesses remain far from fully embracing autonomous AI agents.

Integration challenges, data fragmentation, and reliability concerns continue to slow enterprise rollouts. The difficulties reportedly encountered at Carlyle, where AI tools failed to consistently link data across internal systems, illustrate the unresolved technical hurdles still dogging corporate deployments.

Competition has intensified as well, creating a crowded market with overlapping offerings. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon, and others have launched their own frameworks for building and managing AI assistants, each pushing for dominance in an environment defined by rapid technological leaps and equally rapid hype cycles. The rivalry has raised expectations across the industry, but it has also placed added pressure on clients who are still figuring out which tools genuinely improve productivity and which ones require more maturity before deployment at scale.

Even with these headwinds, the enterprise AI market continues to expand, though its growth is more uneven than headline numbers often imply. Companies widely adopt generative AI for search, summarization, and customer-service augmentation, but agent-based systems demand deeper system integration and higher confidence in automation. That slower, more cautious approach stands in contrast to the feverish build-out of compute capacity, the high-speed release cadence of new models, and the rush among AI firms to establish early market leadership.

Thus, Microsoft’s quota adjustment signals that the industry’s commercial reality is not fully aligned with its technological ambitions. Currently, the company is pouring resources into AI infrastructure and weaving model-based features into every part of its product stack. Yet the Foundry experience highlights a basic truth: the next phase of AI growth depends on convincing large organizations that autonomous systems can function reliably inside complex, legacy-heavy IT environments.