Chrome extensions for weather and at-a-glance updates
Checking whether it will rain before you leave should not cost you a new tab, a cookie banner and three ad slots. Extensions in this category put the answer in a toolbar popup. The ones worth keeping are specific about where their numbers come from.
0 of 1 are live on a store.
What to look for
Look at the data source, not the icon set
Global weather services interpolate a forecast for your address from stations that can be far away, which is why the number often disagrees with the sky outside. A domestic source is queried by grid cell instead. Weather KR reads the Korea Meteorological Administration's neighbourhood forecast, and its host permissions list only apis.data.go.kr and www.kma.go.kr, so you can see exactly which servers it talks to.
Two named hosts beat access to all sites
A data extension only needs to reach the API it reads from, so its host permissions should be a short list of specific domains. If something that just shows a forecast or a headline asks for access to every site you visit, the extra reach is not for the feature. This is the single fastest check on a category like this.
Some extensions ask you to bring your own API key
Korea's public data portal issues free keys per person, and Weather KR asks you to paste yours into its settings before it will load anything. It is an extra ten minutes of setup, but requests then go from your browser straight to the government API with no middleman server in between. An extension that needs no key is usually routing your location through a backend of its own.
Decide how often it should refresh
A background refresh runs on the alarms API, which wakes a service worker on a schedule whether or not you are looking. Frequent polling eats battery and, when you supply the key, your own daily API quota. Weather KR declares storage and alarms and nothing else on the permission side, so refresh behaviour is the thing to tune rather than worry about.
Questions people ask
How do I check the weather in Chrome without opening a website?
Install a weather extension and read it from the toolbar popup. Weather KR shows current temperature, feels-like, precipitation, wind and humidity, plus an hourly view and a seven-day outlook split into morning and afternoon. You never leave the page you were on.
Why does my weather extension get my neighbourhood wrong?
Most international weather extensions estimate your local conditions from the nearest stations they have, and in dense Korean cities that estimate drifts. The Korea Meteorological Administration publishes a forecast per grid cell instead, which is what Weather KR requests for your coordinates. If accuracy at the dong level is the reason you want an extension, check which agency's data it is reading.
Do I need my own API key to use a Korean weather extension?
For Weather KR, yes. You register at data.go.kr, get a free service key for the KMA short-term forecast service, and paste it into the extension's settings panel. Until a key is entered the popup has nothing to fetch, so this is the first setup step rather than an optional extra.
What can a weather extension actually see?
Weather KR declares only storage and alarms, plus host access to apis.data.go.kr and www.kma.go.kr. It has no content scripts, so it never runs on the pages you browse. Your service key and coordinates are kept in Chrome's synced extension storage, which means they travel with your Chrome profile if you have sync turned on, and the location itself is requested through the browser's own prompt that you can decline.