Tag Archives: Chrome Extension

SoundControl Adds Pandora Playback Controls & Notifications To Chrome

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Extensions for controlling YouTube are very common and some of them can be quite powerful. What’s odd is that there aren't nearly as many extensions made for services like Pandora, Grooveshark, or Soundcloud, Pandora possibly being the most left out of the three. If you’re trying to find a convenient way to control Pandora, SoundControl Beta for Pandora might be the perfect solution . It’s a Chrome extension that gives you one button to play, pause, and skip songs. The button must be clicked a certain number of times to execute the function associated with it, and is customizable. SoundControl Beta for Pandora also gives you desktop notifications when a new song plays, and lets you select the volume of the ads and directly switch to the tab you have Pandora open in. The extension remembers the last song you were listening to, along with its last position during playback, so if you close Pandora, the same song that you were last listening to will resume from where you left off, the next time you open it. Read More

Send Facebook Chat Stickers From Google Chrome Using Facemoji

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It has become a dire habit on Facebook’s part for announcing frequent updates for the now billion-user-strong social network, which has also recently entered the mobile arena to a certain degree. Back in March, the company announced revamped Facebook timeline and news feed interface that it started gradually pushing to users. Then earlier last month, Facebook rolled out Facebook Home, which - despite receiving some unexpected hatred from Android users – became an instant success at the Google Play Store. Followed by Home, the internet giant also released updated iOS and Android Facebook apps, bringing in some fresh changes to the table like Chat Heads, an improved interface and Stickers. Though the immensely well-received emoticon-esque Stickers option has been missing the action on the Facebook website itself. This feature allows you to send large cute emoticons to your friends in chat messages. If you want to bring the same stickers fun to the desktop, the tiny Chrome extension Facemoji can help. Read More

Hands-On With Google Hangouts Unified, Cross-Platform IM & Video Chat

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The Google I/O keynote yesterday brought a lot of important announcements, but the revamped Hangouts service seems to have managed to cause the most excitement among them all so far, probably because it has already been rolled out for users all over the world. The iOS app is available in the App Store, while  lot of Android users have managed to get their hands on the Hangouts update for their Google Talk app as well. Google already offered its Google Talk (also called GTalk, Google Chat and Gmail Chat) already enjoyed integration with Google+ and Gmail but compared to the Hangouts feature of Google+, it wasn't too heavy on features. Some of you might have wondered why the plain old chat can’t become as cool as its Google+ variant. Even if you have never thought of that possibility, Google seems to have been thinking along those lines. The new Hangouts can be considered a consolidation of Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts that works on Android, iOS, Google+ and Chrome. The service offers everything from video calling to group chat, and even a huge collection of emoticons. Read More

Clean Up Webpages For Printing; Export To PDF, Cloud & More With CleanPrint For Chrome

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There are two ways to be eco-conscious: one, use less paper; two, make more of less. Since we may never be entirely paper-free, at least not yet, it’s important to exercise good judgment in keeping our waste levels down to a minimum. Printing a web page, for example, can seem indulgent and wasteful because there’s always peripheral content like ads and promos that take too much space, and increase your ink and paper consumption without serving a purpose. Firefox users already have the PDF & Print with Joliprint add-on to clear up their printouts. Chrome users have quite a few options, too, and we’ll be looking at one such today, the Print or PDF with CleanPrint extension. It allows you to strip all the useless content from web pages to prepare them for printing, along with giving you options to save it as a PDF or text file, email it to the intended recipients instead of sending printouts, save it to your Dropbox, Google Drive or Box account, or even send it to your Kindle for offline reading. The extension also supports Google Cloud Print. Read More

Hide Watched YouTube Videos, Disable Autoplay & Default To HD In Chrome

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YouTube has been redesigned quite a few times; features have come and gone, and improved upon. With the service offering so much, it's hard to say there will ever be a design or layout that everyone likes, so those who aren't happy with the interface will either have to get used to it, or use an extension to tweak it. There's no shortage of extensions that tweak, improve, or clean up YouTube's interface, and YouTweak for YouTube is another one of those extensions for Chrome. It allows you to remove videos you've watched from appearing as suggestions or in search results, redirect the YouTube logo to point to any URL, disable YouTube's auto play feature, and have every video play in 720px resolution. Each one of these options can be enabled or disabled individually, giving you complete control over the extension. Read More

Use The Mouse Wheel To Quickly Switch Between Tabs In Chrome

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If you thought a Batman spinoff on yet another item just wasn't possible, Tabman Tabs Manager is a Chrome extension that will change your mind. It’s a tab manager that adds a Batman-like button to the URL bar, which in turn allows you to switch between the different tabs open in the current window. It'll serve little to no purpose if you just have a few tabs open but for those marathon browsing sessions, it can make finding specific tabs from the countless open ones a lot easier! It’s somewhat similar to Sidewise Tree Style Tab that we covered a few days ago, except that it focuses on switching tabs and provides both a mouse gesture (moving the scroll wheel) and use keyboard shortcuts to open the extension’s panel. If you don’t like switching between tabs via a popup, Sidewise Tree Style Tab works in a ‘Dock’ mode as well, where it separates into another window and allows you to search and switch between tabs from it. Read More

View Recent Bookmarks Sorted By Date & Time In Google Chrome

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Bookmarks can be divided into two types: those for sites you want to refer back to in the immediate future, and those for sites you want to keep around pretty much forever. Now, common sense dictates that older bookmarks, the ones you’re storing, should appear at the bottom and newer, more recent ones that you’re probably going to view earlier, should appear nearer the top, for ease of access. Firefox has the coveted “Recently Bookmarked” viewer in its bookmarks panel, but not Chrome. That is, not until Recent Bookmarks for Chrome, an extension that adds a button for quickly viewing your latest bookmarks in a list divided by day and date. Read More

10 Great Chrome Extensions For Twitter

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Twitter is a very engaging network; you can open your timeline and before you know it, you've spent the better part of an hour reading links or conversing (read: debating trolls). For this and several other reasons, many users prefer Twitter clients over the web interface. Most Twitter clients not only have better features, but also support notifications for your @mentions, direct messages etc. At the same time, they give you control over the content you see, ensuring that only important things disrupt your work. The problem is that Twitter likes to axe the abilities of third-party Twitter clients by restricting its API, and many users have to turn to its web interface whether they like it or not. It’s situations like this when extensions can be very handy. Provided you have the right ones installed, your browser can act like an impressive Twitter client itself, and we've compiled a list of extensions for Chrome that will help you do just that. Read More

Open Word, Excel & PowerPoint Files In Chrome With Office Viewer

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Chrome can open a lot of different files without the need to install any extra plugins, extensions, or scripts. In fact, many modern browsers can open some of the common file types that are used everyday including media files in MP3 and MP4 format, and PDF documents. Granted that browsers aren't the best file viewers for multimedia files, they are still great for quick previews or when you don’t have your preferred app available. The one file format, or rather the group of file formats that browsers don’t normally support by default are Microsoft Office documents, presentations, spreadsheets et al. If you don’t have Office installed on your PC or Mac, you can turn to Google Drive’s web version or services like Box and Jumpshare that offer online file previews in order to view these files. Chrome users on the Beta channel now have another option. Google has released a new extension called Chrome Office Viewer that allows you to drag and drop your Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files to your browser’s window and view them in it directly. The extension is currently experimental, so expect a hiccup or two here and there. Read More

Get A Tree Style View Of Chrome Tabs; Group & Hibernate Them

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Chrome is probably the most popular web popular browser out there, but it has often left many power-users somewhat unsatisfied. Imagine you’re a corporate lawyer who needs dozens of case files open in dozens of tabs, or a researcher who needs to keep countless of tabs open at the same time while you write that thesis. Chrome is fast and simple, but sometimes what you need more is endurance. The side-docking Sidewise Tree Style Tabs is an extension that aims to take care of managing all those tabs more effectively. In a nutshell, you can give it any load of tabs you wish, and fully expect it to run those marathon browsing sessions for as long as you want. Read More

Search Major Websites Directly From Google’s Home Page

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Google is, without question, the best search engine out there for general web searches, but there are quite a number of other popular services that many users search on apart from Google, often for more specific types of searches. Where Googling gives you a comprehensive list of relevant results from multiple websites, searches on services like YouTube, ebay, IMDb etc. give you more relevant results of a particular nature. You can use extensions like Multi Search to select text from any web page and search for it on different websites from the right-click context menu. Search Switch is an extension available for both Chrome and Firefox that adds a switching menu to the default Google search page. It allows you to change the search site by scrolling the mouse wheel, or select one from the list that appears when you click the extension’s button. Read More

Get The Google Reader Look & Feel In Feedly For Chrome With This Theme

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July is inching closer, and that means some of us will soon be faced with a tough decision: what service to use in Google Reader’s place? We have compiled a handy list that you can take a look at and find a suitable Google Reader alternative. By far, Feedly is one of the most preferred services of many Google Reader that they will be migrating to, and I’m personally inclined towards it myself since they've been proactive about filing the gap that Google Reader will leave behind, and because the interface is the best I've seen. For those who are planning on switching to the service, Feedly Reader is a Chrome extension that modifies Feedly so that its interface is more like Google Reader. The extension has no customization options and acts like another theme for Feedly. Read More

Add Support For Viewing Emoji On Any Web Page In Chrome With Chromoji

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Emoji have been in use in OS X since Lion and with iOS 6, Apple added native support to its mobile platform for these cute emoticons that depict a wide variety feelings, events, and everyday items. Compared to the limited choice you have with everyday emoticons in several apps, emoji are rich with options. Chromoji is a Chrome extension that allows you to see emoji icons wherever they've been used. The extension works in the background and replaces the block characters that would normally appear in place of an emoji icon, with the real one,  loading the picture the same time as the page itself loads. You can limit the extension to loading only the emoji that are available in iOS, and exclude the ones for symbols like trademark and copyright etc. Read More

Quickly Separate Current Chrome Tab To New Window With Predefined Section Of Screen

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There is no single best way for managing tabs within a browser window. Between leading browsers Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, and the large number of add-ons and extensions that change the way tabs and windows are managed by default, there is, as yet, no clear winner. Tab to Window Keyboard Shortcut is yet another extension for Chrome that takes a crack at window and tab management. The extension’s primary purpose is to let you separate a tab from a window and move it to a window of its own. What it does in addition to this is allow you to choose just how the new and original window will take up space on your screen alongside each other. For that, it splits the screen into two parts, letting you decide the size of each. The shortcut for separating a tab to a new window can be customized. Read More

Get A Google Now-Like Chrome New Tab Page With Weather & News

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Extensions that modify the New Tab page in Chrome are very easy to find, but you’ll likely go through at least fifty of them before you come across one that you actually like. New Tab Page - as its name indicates - is a Chrome extension that changes the New Tab page in Chrome. New Tab Page features a search bar, intelligently incorporates recently visited pages, shows you the latest news and weather forecast for your current location, and still keeps your Chrome apps accessible from the New Tab page. The extension isn't customizable at all, but its default layout is excellent for the simple reason that it manages to fit all the above on a single page without sacrificing any feature that Chrome offers on its stock New Tab page by default. Read More

Access Google Keep In An Always-On-Top Chrome Panel Or A Simple Popup

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It was only a matter of time until an extension for Google Keep made it to the Chrome Web Store. Google Keep Extension is an unofficial extension for Google’s note taking service Keep, which was launched only last month. Like it was with Google Drive, developers have beaten Google to the extension race for Keep. Google Keep Extension makes use of an experimental feature in Chrome called panels, which you will have to enable before you can use the extension. It launches Keep in a separate stand-alone panel that remains on top of all other windows. You can add notes to it, view all previous notes that you've added, and delete any one of them. If you aren't too enthusiastic about using Keep in a panel, you can go to the extension’s options and have it open in a popup or just a new tab. Google Keep Extension also adds an option to the right-click context menu that will allow you to open the panel/popup/tab from any web page. Read More

Hide Or Replace Profane Text On Websites With Word Filter For Chrome

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Being online can be a tiresome experience. On a pleasant stroll through the internet, you’re likely to encounter many different shades of cynicism. It’s just too hard to ignore them all. So what do you do? You wear rose-tinted glasses. For all the visual clutter, many use ad-blockers. And for the written pollution, your lens of choice would be Word Filter 4.2, a Google Chrome extension that replaces a list of words with others of your choice on any webpage that you visit. Read More

Get The Old Style Right-Click Context Menu Back In Chrome

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Following its last update, Chrome did something rare: it made a UI change that modified the appearance of the right-click context menu. The new look is not bad in any sense; in fact it feels quite nice and clean. When I first saw it, I thought it had something to do with one of the extensions I had installed, though a little looking around made it clear that the change was brought about by the browser itself. As pretty as the context menu is now, not everyone might like it because they might have grown accustomed to the old one. If you miss that old appearance and are having difficulty adjusting to the new look, getting it back is super-simple. Read More

Never Lose Where You Were In An Article With Scroll Marker For Chrome

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Losing track of where you were within an article or book while reading it is common and can happen to just about anyone. The difference between losing track when reading online, as opposed to reading a book, is the 'Find on page' solution that can help you search for the part of the article you were last at. Of course, when you read online, this problem doesn't only arise when you switch to a different tab for a second or resume reading a lengthy article after a short break. Losing the line you were at is more likely to happen when you scroll the web page down to view the content below the fold. Depending on how you scrolled down, i.e. used the scroll wheel on your mouse, used the Page Down button, or just clicked and dragged the scroll bar, the distance that the page is scrolled will be different. You can’t even train your eyes to follow the content when it scrolls up. Scroll Marker is a Chrome extension that ensures you won’t lose the point in the article you were at. It adds a horizontal line to the web page right at the bottom; when you scroll down, the line sticks to its position and remains there (so long as that part of the web page is visible). After a few seconds, the line returns to its original position at the bottom of the page. Read More

dragdis Is A New, Dead Simple Way To Save Web Content Via Drag & Drop

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Evernote combined with its web clipper forms what is currently the best way to save web content. Then there are services like Minus that focus a lot on drag and drop to provide users with a quick way to share files over the web. dragdis is a web service that changes the game entirely; to use the service and not fall in love with it would be astounding. It has a web interface and browser extensions that allow you to save videos, images and text to your own repository by dragging & dropping them onto a sidebar. The sidebar appears only when you’re dragging something to it and remains invisible otherwise. Items can be sorted to a new or existing folder as they're being added. The items themselves can be previewed on the service’s web interface and shared on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. dragdis is in private beta, but they’re quite quick to send out invites. Read More