Grammarly Browser Extension: Install, Privacy, and Alternatives

If you’ve installed the Grammarly browser extension expecting it to just underline the odd typo, you’ve probably noticed it does a lot more than that now. It sits in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, watches the text fields on the pages you visit, and offers corrections, tone notes, and (on the paid tier) full AI rewrites. That’s genuinely useful. It’s also exactly the kind of extension that raises fair questions: what does it actually see, does it read your passwords, and why does the checker sometimes vanish on a site you use every day.

This guide covers what the Grammarly extension is, which browsers it runs on, what its own privacy documentation says about your data, and how to fix it when it stops working. Near the end, we’ll get into a smaller but real risk: any extension, Grammarly included, can occasionally trigger a browser reload, and that’s the moment your open tabs are on the line.

What Is the Grammarly Browser Extension?

The Grammarly browser extension is an add-on that checks your writing for spelling, grammar, and tone directly inside the text fields you type into on the web. Grammarly’s own product page describes it as “industry-leading AI writing assistance whenever and wherever you work online,” and says it can “instantly create drafts, replies, and rewrites with generative AI.”

Unlike a tool tied to one website, Grammarly is marketed to work broadly across “1 million+ apps and programs” on the web, not a fixed list of supported sites. In practice that means the same underlining and suggestion box shows up whether you’re writing an email, a document in a browser-based editor, or a comment on a forum.

The extension is separate from the Grammarly desktop app and the Grammarly Editor you can open directly in a browser tab. The extension’s job is narrower and more useful for everyday typing: it rides along in whatever tab has an editable text field and checks what you write as you go, without you needing to copy text anywhere else first.

Extension vs. desktop app vs. editor. Grammarly ships as three related things: the browser extension (checks text inline on websites), a desktop app (for native apps like Word), and the web-based Grammarly Editor. This guide is about the browser extension specifically.

How Do I Install the Grammarly Extension on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari?

You install the Grammarly extension from your browser’s own extension store, and the exact click sequence differs slightly by browser. Grammarly’s support documentation spells out each one, and the table below is the short version.

One detail worth knowing before you install on a Mac: Grammarly’s documentation notes that on Safari, the extension is turned off by default for every website. You’ll need to switch it on for a site the first time you want it active there, which is a slightly different starting state than Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. For a general walkthrough of adding any extension to Chrome specifically, see our guide on adding extensions to Chrome.

What Browsers Does Grammarly Not Support?

Grammarly does not currently support Opera or Brave. Its own support article states plainly that “other browsers, such as Opera or Brave, are not supported at this time,” alongside its confirmed list of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

That’s a meaningful gap if Opera or Brave is your daily browser. Both are Chromium-based, so in theory a Chrome-store extension could technically load, but Grammarly’s own documentation doesn’t list either as a supported target, and unsupported usually means untested rather than merely unlisted. If something breaks, you’re on your own.

If writing assistance matters more to you than sticking with Opera or Brave specifically, the practical options are: switch to one of the four supported browsers for writing-heavy tasks, or look at what each of those browsers offers natively or through its own store. We cover the extension landscape for both in our guides to Opera extensions and Brave extensions, and a broader look at Edge extensions and Firefox extensions if you’re considering a switch just for this.

Is the Grammarly Extension Free, and What Does Grammarly Pro Add?

The Grammarly browser extension itself is free to install, and its free tier covers core grammar and spelling correction. Grammarly Pro is the named paid tier that layers on generative-AI features.

According to Grammarly’s own product page, the free tier handles the everyday underline-and-fix workflow, while Pro adds the ability to “instantly create drafts, replies, and rewrites with generative AI,” along with fuller tone detection and vocabulary suggestions.

If you mostly want typo-catching and clarity fixes, the free tier does that job without asking for a card. Pro makes more sense if you’re regularly drafting from scratch and want the AI to generate a first pass you then edit, rather than just fixing what you’ve already written. It’s worth trying the free tier for a week or two of normal writing before deciding whether the AI drafting features earn a subscription for how you work.

Is the Grammarly Browser Extension Safe?

Grammarly’s own documentation states that data is processed inside its private network and encrypted both in transit and at rest, which is a reasonable baseline for a text-processing extension. Specifically, Grammarly says “all components that process your data operate in Grammarly’s private network,” with data “stored on servers hosted by Amazon Web Services in the United States.”

On encryption, Grammarly states that “data in transit is encrypted using TLS” and “data at rest is encrypted using AES256,” with AWS Key Management Services used for database encryption. On the commercial side, Grammarly’s privacy FAQ says directly: “We do not sell your content. We make money when users purchase our paid products.”

None of that makes an extension risk-free by definition; it just means Grammarly’s stated practices line up with what you’d want from a company handling large amounts of your unpublished writing. You can also opt out of having your content used for “product improvement and training” from your account controls, according to the same FAQ, if you’d rather your drafts never feed model training.

Does Grammarly Read Everything I Type?

No. Grammarly’s own privacy FAQ states directly that it “does not record every keystroke on your device,” and it is separately blocked from running in certain field types altogether.

The same documentation says Grammarly “is also blocked from running in read-only and sensitive fields, such as payment forms, passwords, and addresses.” That’s a meaningful distinction from a generic keylogger: the extension is designed to skip the exact fields where sensitive data lives, rather than relying on you to notice and disable it manually.

That said, “blocked from sensitive fields” is a category-based rule, not a guarantee about every custom form on every website. A poorly built form that doesn’t use standard password or payment field types could, in theory, behave unpredictably with any extension watching the page, not just Grammarly. If you’re filling out something you’d rather no extension touch (tax forms, medical intake, anything with account recovery codes) it’s reasonable to disable writing-assistant extensions for that tab specifically rather than trust field detection alone.

Why Isn’t Grammarly Working on a Website?

Grammarly usually stops working on a site for one of three reasons: the field is marked sensitive or read-only, the checker has been toggled off for that specific site, or you’re on a browser Grammarly doesn’t support. Working through those in order solves most cases.

Start with the simplest explanation. Grammarly is deliberately blocked from sensitive and read-only fields, so if you’re typing into a password box, a payment form, or certain locked-down fields, the absence of the checker is by design, not a bug. Next, check whether the extension has been switched off for that particular domain, since a lot of people toggle Grammarly off on sites like their email client without remembering they did it. Finally, confirm your browser is one of the four Grammarly supports.

If none of that explains it, the site itself may use a custom text editor that doesn’t expose a standard field for extensions to detect, which is a known limitation for writing tools in general, not unique to Grammarly.

How Do I Turn Grammarly Off for One Site or Field?

You turn Grammarly off for a specific site using its own toggle, typically reached from the extension icon in your browser toolbar. The exact wording of the toggle can vary by browser and by Grammarly version, so if you don’t see it immediately, check the extension’s settings page for a per-site or per-domain list.

Turning it off doesn’t require uninstalling anything, and it’s the right move for sites where you don’t want writing suggestions cluttering the page, or where you’d rather no extension touches the text at all, even one with sensitive-field protections.

On Safari specifically, remember the default runs the other way: the extension starts off for every site, so you’re opting in per domain rather than opting out.

What Permissions Does the Grammarly Extension Need, and Why Should You Care?

Every browser extension, Grammarly included, declares what it needs access to in a manifest file, and some of those permissions trigger warning prompts you should read. Chrome’s own developer documentation describes the manifest as the file that “records important metadata, defines resources, declares permissions, and identifies which files to run in the background and on the page,” and notes that some permissions “trigger warnings that users must allow to continue using the extension.”

A writing assistant necessarily needs fairly broad access to see what you type across many sites, which is part of why it matters that Grammarly documents field-level exclusions for sensitive data. It’s a reasonable trade for the feature it delivers. But it’s worth being deliberate about which extensions get that level of access, and reviewing the permission list again after major updates, since scope can expand.

This is where it’s worth comparing extension categories rather than just extensions. A writing checker needs to see form content by design. A tab-management tool doesn’t, and shouldn’t ask for it.

What Happens to Your Tabs When You Add, Update, or Remove an Extension?

Installing, updating, or removing any browser extension can prompt your browser to reload extension pages or, in some cases, restart itself, which puts whatever you had open at risk. This isn’t specific to Grammarly. It’s a general property of how extensions integrate with a browser, and it’s one of those small maintenance moments people don’t think about until they’ve lost a window full of tabs.

Chrome, Edge, and Firefox each have some form of session restore, but it’s not designed as a dedicated backup system, and it can fail after a crash, an update, or a forced restart. If you’ve ever opened your browser after a routine extension update and found a blank new-tab page instead of the forty tabs you had going, you already know the gap.

BelayTab is built specifically for that gap. It takes automatic snapshots of every open window every 5 minutes and again whenever a window closes, keeps the last 20 versions of each saved session so restoring never overwrites your history, and holds deleted sessions in a 30-day trash. Everything shows up on one Recovery screen: snapshots, deleted sessions, the browser’s own recently closed windows, and any exported files, all in one place instead of scattered across separate menus.

It also respects a real limit worth stating plainly: BelayTab can’t recover tabs from before it was installed, and it can’t fix a crash or freeze on its own. What it does is make sure that once it’s running, the tabs you had open survive whatever happens next, whether that’s an extension update, a browser restart, or you simply closing the wrong window by mistake. You can read more about how the automatic side of that works on the automatic snapshots page, or see the full recovery screen breakdown.

Good habit for any extension-heavy setup. If you run a lot of extensions (Grammarly plus a password manager, an ad blocker, a note tool) the odds of one triggering a reload go up. Save your current session before you install or update anything new, not after something goes wrong.

For managing the extensions themselves day to day, our guide on managing Chrome extensions covers how to review, disable, and clean up what you’ve installed, and pairs well with keeping your tabs backed up independently of whatever changes you make there.