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Convert currency and units automatically in Chrome

Depending on where you live, you are either familiar with the metric or imperial system. Problems can arise if you visit a country that is using the other system. If you are from Europe, you may have troubles converting Gallons, Inches or Ounces to Liters, Meters or Grams.

The same may be true for a person from the US who plans a roadtrip in a country using the metric system as units such as Celsius, Kilometer or Watt may need to be converted.

Even if you don't visit such a country, you may be exposed to its unit system on the Internet. If you read a foreign newspaper for instance regularly, or hang out on a site like Reddit or Hacker News were users from all over the world post contributions to.

The Chrome extension autoConvert makes things a lot easier. It converts units and currency on pages that you visit automatically.

The extension supports a wide variety of units that measure distance, weight, power, temperature and more.

convert units automatically

When you first run it, you should visit the options to select the units that you are using and the currency you want all other currencies to be converted to.

The extension gives you options to disable the conversion of some units. This can be useful as it speeds up the loading time of pages, and if you are not interested in torque, power or area conversions, then you can disable those in the settings.

The default behavior of autoConvert is to keep the original value on web pages and highlight that the unit or currency has been converted.

All you have to do then is to hover the mouse cursor over the item to get a small popup listing the converted unit or currency.

You can modify the behavior so that units and/or currency get converted automatically instead.

A whitelist is provided which you can add domains or keywords to. It ships with five domains and keywords included by default which are: docs.google.com, https://, wp-admin, netflix.com and amazon

autoconvert settings

While it is possible to remove a whitelisted entry , they have been added there for a reason. The page on Amazon may throw a plug-in unresponsive warning at first.

The advanced settings highlight that some unit abbreviations are not converted by default. This includes "in", "and" and "to" as they are used in sentences a lot and would impact the loading time negatively.

You can however enable those but it is generally not recommended.

Closing Words

The Chrome extension autoConvert is a convenient addition to the browser as it converts units and currency automatically on pages.

You may notice odd behavior on some pages and may need to add those to the whitelist to avoid this in the future.

An option to run the extension only on select pages instead of all of them would come in handy. As would an option to switch from automatic to manual conversions.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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