I’ve not done a geeky post in a while so I thought I’d rattle one off while I have a little spare time.
My current browser of choice is Google Chrome, although I confess it’s not 100% compatible with every site at present. Zemanta‘s WordPress plug-in, for starters, has some issues. But overall I’m finding it fast and stable across all the platforms on which I have it installed. This does not include MacOS, though, as the council won’t update the OS on the computers at work to one which will handle Chrome. Hell, we’re still on Firefox 1.x on the machines there!
One of the things that all the major browsers now allow you to do is to add extensions, or plug-ins. These can add functionality, repair interface problems, alter behaviour and so on. Basically, they let you tweak the browser so that it does that little bit more in the way you want it.
There are literally thousands of these little add-ons. One of the things I love about Chrome is that it is capable of syncing your extensions across various computers via your Google account. This means if I find an extension I like while using my netbook, it will be installed and configured on my laptop or desktop the next time I book up and go online. I don’t even have to remember.
I recently dug my old desktop out of storage after 6 years. I installed Chrome for the first time and within minutes, with no effort from myself other than putting in a username, it was configured with most of the extensions I use elsewhere.
“Most”? Ah, yes. One rule is that Chrome will only sync extensions that are in the official Google Chrome repository. For various reasons, some aren’t in there and these include some that I do use. Just like Apple apps, Android apps and so on there are third party repositories with apps that haven’t been submitted to the “official” stores, or which have been rejected.
If these don’t check themselves automatically then you do still have to manually ensure they’re upgraded and so forth. A shame, but understandable.
So anyway, without further ado – here are the extensions I have installed (and usually use regularly). Which ones do you use that may be useful?
Apparently the world’s most popular extension and available on most major browsers, Adblock Plus uses frequently updated filters to remove adverts from common websites, as well as preventing annoying pop-ups and pop-unders. Zero maintenance and one I installed as soon as I could get it for Chrome after using it for ages on FireFox.
I share a lot of links on Facebook and Twitter using “j.mp”, part of the bit.ly family. This extension makes it incredibly easy to do so. Just visit the page I want to share and click on the icon on the menu bar. The URL is shortened and I can then edit a message to go with it before posting to Twitter and/or Facebook.
Not the most exciting one, this. All it does is provide a drop-down list for all the system pages within Chrome. It just saves a bit of menu digging, or memorising shortcut keys.
Originally installed when I realised that Chrome didn’t have an easy way of subscribing to an RSS feed as FireFox did. With this installed, any site with an RSS feed generates a small icon in the address bar. Clicking on this adds the feed to Google Reader (which I use anyway), and also allows it to be categorised, ready to be read the next time I’m checking my news feeds.
Chromey Calculator and Chromey Calculator Enhancer
I use the calculator a lot when I’m working for various things, and I love the way that Google can do a lot of lookups relating to conversions, units of measurement, currency and the like. Chromey Calculator brings this into an icon-activated popup and the Enhancer adds localisation and a shortcut key. Google isn’t the only site used for reference (Wolfram Alpha is another, to start with) and it makes for a very useful little add-on.
Easy YouTube Video Downloader (via ChromeExtensions.org)
This is one of the extensions that isn’t in the official Google repository, most likely as it allows you to rip videos from YouTube which Google also owns. There are many ways to rip YouTube videos, but I find this one to be the neatest and easiest. The download option sits nicely on the usual webpage and looks like it’s always been there – though it doesn’t work on channel pages, just individual video pages.
Also note that on occasion it will “break” as YouTube changes its layout, but the developers usually update pretty quickly. You’ll have to check manually for these updates when you notice it’s not working though.
I think I mentioned this on a previous post, but it fixes a very small problem on a very specific website. In this case, Facebook recently decided to get rid of the “Comment” button and instead made the return key publish what you’d typed. In one fell swoop they removed the use of paragraphs and made the site even more prone to horrendous grammar and layout than before. Anyway, this tiny extension reverses this “update” and makes things nice and sensible again.
Now, if only someone would release an extension to repair all the bolloxed privacy settings on facebook…
A recent addition to my arsenal and one that would have the privacy freaks up in arms, but I think it’s worth it. Essentially, Greplin (love the name, by the way – a sneaky geek/UNIX reference) creates an index of sites that you link it to and uses these to make your searches quicker and easier. Amongst these are Google Mail, Calendar, Documents and Reader as well as Facebook, Twitter and a pile of other sites. There are some “premium/paid” only sites as well, including Google Apps sites.
Yes, it means a third party app has its claws in your data so that it can index it. Whether this is worth it is up to you. I find that with Greplin enabled, my GMail searching is better and it’s lovely having the little search button on my menu bar that trawls through all  my linked sites very quickly to return hits based on keywords.
There are several versions of this Windows-only extension, but I’ve settled on this one, partly as it’s in the official Google repository (at last). As I mentioned in the introduction, Chrome doesn’t work 100% with some websites. IE Tab allows you to open these sites using the Internet Explorer engine… without leaving Chrome. You can set up a list of pages/sites which will automatically be opened using IE Tab so that you don’t have to load it, click the icon and reload in IE.
A very useful little tool for checking the lowest price of goods you’re looking at. Checking out a DVD on Amazon? InvisibleHand will display a yellow bar at the top of the screen and let you know if you could be getting it cheaper from HMV or Play. It isn’t perfect, of course. It can’t check every website on the planet for every product, and it doesn’t take postage into account. However, it’s a great ready-reckoner and has already saved me around £20-£30 across a couple of purchases.
A nice security extension this one. Where possible, you should be using secure internet connections. Some websites, such as GMail, have a menu option which will ensure that when you connect you use HTTPS instead of usual HTTP. This encrypts your data as it goes back and forth and makes it far more difficult for someone to “sniff” your data in transit and pinch your logon details or correspondence. Facebook also offers this, but it’s turned off by default which is ludicrous.
KB SSL Enforcer forces a secure connection to any and every website that you go to. Now, this won’t always work. If the site doesn’t support HTTPS then fine, you’ll just connect with HTTP. Nothing lost, nothing gained. There are some sites, though, with partially functional HTTPS and these will often connect and seem OK until you try to perform some action when it won’t work. I’ve had this with logons, queries and even finding some information on the screen which is simply not there if you connect via HTTPS.
In this case, simply blacklist the site in the extension’s options and it will allow it to connect via HTTP instead. Not so much a worry at home, but a great extension for those who use their laptops and netbooks all over the place.
LastPass (and a link to the associated web site)
The main website does a great job of describing this superb extension including videos and so forth. Basically, it’s a secure password vault that stores your logon details for any website. They’re encrypted, hashed, you name it. It includes an option to generate a random password for each website. One-time passwords can be created and used to log onto LastPass.com if you’re in a cyber café on a dodgy computer – if someone logs the keypresses, it makes no difference as the password is discarded as soon as you’ve used it to log in once.
The paid version includes further security as well as a mobile app. Â LastPass gets round one major problem with websites – using the same damn login and password for far too many. This means that if your password is compromised, someone can access all of your data. Use LastPass, keep that one password ridiculously secure and you’re taking a large step towards protecting your online identity.
This isn’t anything too fancy, just a new “new tab” page for Chrome that takes the “dial” layout that was originally – I think – used by Opera. It’s simple, customisable and opens quickly. I don’t make a massive amount of use of it, but it’s nice enough.
Ever visited a web page where there are a handful of YouTube videos, all of which set to play automatically? Or even gone to one site and realised (once the noise has woken the child next to you or alerted your colleagues to the fact that you’re viewing Greatest Movie Deaths instead of working) that there is a video embedded partway down? This extension prevents that by forcing all YouTube videos on a page to pause until you decide you want the damn thing to play. Better than other similar extensions, this one allows the videos to download (“buffer”) while paused. Simple and effective.
This plug-in adds an extra drop-down menu to Google Reader which does a few things, but chief amongst these is to automatically download the entire post for blogs which only publish the first paragraph or so to their feed. Some people maybe don’t realise they have their blogging software set to do this, others maybe want you to head to the blog so they get “per appearance” advertising revenue. I’m often too lazy to click through, so having the whole text in my reader is far more convenient.
Super Google Reader will yank it down either as plain text or in the format of the actual blog page (including borders, widgets, etc). Impressive.
TweetFilter (not in the repository)
Another superb extension that for some reason isn’t in the official repositories. TweetFilter does a lot with the “new” Twitter interface. You do need to keep an eye out for it breaking, though, as Twitter do recode their site regularly. The developers of TweetFilter do a good job of keeping up to date.
Foremost, it allows you to filter out (or only filter for) certain terms in your Twitter feed. Great for getting rid of all the bloody Britain’s Got Talent cobblers and the like that infest my feed every weekend. It will also get rid of adverts, those irritating “Twitter recommends you follow these people for no reason at all” mentions and a ton of other stuff. It’s very customisable.
Kind of the opposite of the aforementioned bit.ly extension, this one “decodes” shortened URLs on web pages and gives you the actual link behind them. Very useful to ensure that the link is genuine and doesn’t take you to some porn site. Or worse, the Daily Mail.
While Chrome will allow you to sync bookmarks, I’m not keen on Google’s way of handling them once you have them online. It’s a mess, frankly. Xmarks was recently bought out by LastPass and it’s handled every bit as professionally. It’s also cross-browser (useful at work where I can’t install Chrome) and browser-independent if you visit the site directly. The Chrome version is feature-light compared to the FireFox one, which allows comments and tagging of newly-added bookmarks. Hopefully this will come with time, but isn’t a major issue. At the end of the day it performs the most important task of keeping bookmarks synchronised and organised across multiple platforms.
I have been a Mac user for some time now and when I switched, I chose to stick with Safari. It is fast enough and syncs all my bookmarks up with my other devices easily enough via iTunes (only when connected to the desktop but I can live with that).
Mail, Calendar, Contacts and RSS feeds are synced via the cloud from my Google account straight to the native Apple programs (I could use either Mail or Safari as my RSS reader but opted for NetNewsWire). The whole thing is fairly transparent and works great.
Sounds like the OS on your Macs at work is quite old now (Tiger?). Do you have hardware which supports Snow Leopard? My wife’s G4 (PPC architecture) runs Tiger and will only go as far as Leopard itself.
I do still have a Windows (XP) laptop and (W7) media PC and on those I use Firefox. I dabbled with Chrome for a little while but I found it to be pretty slow (it was a good while ago when I used it though). I use Adblock for Firefox and Safari but couldn’t find a decent solution for Chrome at the time. Obviously judging by your post, this has been rectified. Admittedly, I don’t often used the browsers on these machines as the laptop is used only for occasional DJing and the media centre is used for PVR and Video playback.
Getting back to plugins, there are a couple of Facebook cleanup plugins I found (Safari, not sure about FF/Chrome) which get rid of the adverts on Facebook, if you are a big user of that site and find that troublesome. I find that often I will use a plugin for a short time and then get bored of it. They are fun for a little while. I have a Twitter plugin too, along with bit.ly functionality (this one is useful) but even then, I go to the Twitter app on my Mac.
I almost didn’t approve your comment as you’re a Mac user 😉
Yeah, the machines at work are on MacOs 10.4.11 (whichever feline that’s named after) and the Powers That Be won’t upgrade them. As a result we’re stuck with a *lot* of software that we can’t update, or use the most recent versions of. I think I also mentioned that we’re on Firefox 1.5 or similar on most of the clients. Mine’s on 3.16 – you can’t install 4 without upgrading the OS (which Firefox don’t actually tell you until you download it and try to install it).
I gave up on Firefox on my laptop as it was getting ridiculously slow. I tried every trick I could find to speed it up (including a removal/reinstall), but it was a pointless exercise. On that machine, Firefox was taking nigh on two minutes to fire up. Chrome – with extensions – takes nearer 20 seconds.
The Facebook extension you mention is probably Better Facebook. I think I used it on Firefox some time ago when it was very “beta-ish” and wasn’t too impressed, but mainly as facebook was undergoing a lot of development / changes that the developers were struggling to keep up with. Having said that, I mentally block out ads these days. I read the other week that Google will be using new algorithms to make GMail ads more accurately targeted to the user. I had to load up GMail and double-check to see that it still *had* ads there. I’d completely filtered them out myself!
I could possibly sync things via iTunes, but I hate it. I appreciate it’s a better product than it was a couple of years ago, but on a Windows system Apple’s software is still invasive, badly-installed and a pain in the arse to remove again. Not as bad as Norton and McAfee products, but not far behind – kind of on a par with Adobe. I won’t even put QuickTime on any more.
I did once use a handful of standalone apps for my calendar, contacts and so forth (Thunderbird and others), but have found that I actually quite like Google’s own utilities. There’s no need for third party software for me, and GMail and Google Calendar also now offer “offline modes” which are useful should you be in a position whereby you’d be unconnected for some time.
The plugins I use vary in their frequency of usage. The bit.ly one, LastPass and Xmarks are used constantly. I usually use facebook on my phone, but on the desktop the extension to replace the “comment” button has restored my blood pressure to an acceptable level. IETab is useful for 2-3 sites that I visit almost every day.
While drafting the article I came across a couple of extensions that I really didn’t use any more. So I ditched them 🙂
Each to their own!
“I almost didn’t approve your comment as you’re a Mac user ” lol, that comment didn’t surprise me but like you say, each to their own.
Firefox did used to have very different version numbers between the Windows and Mac versions. I don’t know what the situation is now.
I tried to use iTunes on a Windows machine a couple of times. It was pretty bad I must admit. Both it and Quicktime are forever bugging me to upgrade on the media machine.
Yes, 10.4 is Tiger which is still a decent enough OS. Your hardware might be G4 which only goes up to Leopard anyway, which isn’t a massive quantum leap. Sometimes, running an old version of a piece of software is not so bad if what it is being used for is within the parameters of what it is capable of. The missus hasn’t got any complaints with her machine, although I know that it won’t be too long until she could do with something more up to date (that will be her getting my old one then and me upgrading). However we are both staying Mac for our main machines, so it will be a while until I have the cash to upgrade!
Mac and Windows Firefox have been following version numbers for some time now, I think. Needless to say v1.x of Firefox on either OS is ridiculous. YouTube and other sites complain about not being compatible and that the browser should be upgraded. It’s the open source equivalent of running IE6.
iTunes biggest act of evil was automatically ticking the boxes to download and install Safari and Quicktime when it upgraded for a while. Quicktime, similarly, downloaded and installed iTunes and Safari by default. A great way for Apple to claim a few thousand more Safari installs… And for a browser that, at the time, was in its infancy on the PC platform.
The machines at school may or may not be able to cope with an OS upgrade, though I think they can according to my boss who’s more of a Mac-head. The issue is the council refusing to stump up for it and we, as a school, aren’t allowed to. Our support is run third party through BT who are a useless shower of ****, frankly. They won the contract partially on the basis of being able to support both platforms and have proves consistently that they can’t adequately support either.
Regardless, they just won a 5-year extension to said contract. Go figure.
I’ll bet that the computer systems my work uses are crapper than yours. But as I don’t want to divulge who I work for online I’d have to discuss it by email if you’re curious 🙂
Anyway, just so you know, although that fb update is INCREDIBLY annoying – they haven’t actually removed paragraphs. You just have to remember to do shift+enter. Which if anything is more annoying, because you then know paras are possible so your brain is *less* likely to remember to press shift. Aaaaargh.
Also, I suspect I know the answer, but what do you think about this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/12/james-cameron-3d-film
1) I work for a school which means (from what I can gather) we fall very low in the list of importance for having new things/money spent on us. Compared to councillors and the like who I’m sure get the newest laptops and 24-hour instant call-out support to change the language on their spellchecker.
2) facebook didn’t bother to tell anyone about the shift-enter thing and it’s completely non-intuitive. The number of multiple posts I saw in the days after the change where people had just hit enter and posted by mistake was staggering. If their servers are running out of space and they need people to post less, can’t they at least be honest about it?
3) Bollocks. There are already sensible warnings regarding 3D being viewed by youngsters (under 5s) as it causes eye strain. You can’t have 100% 3D coverage when a large proportion of your cinema audience are unable to watch it. I’d be interested in seeing the response from the RNIB which I gather will have something to say about the number of partially-sighted (one-eyed in particular) people who will be unable to enjoy the cinema is everything goes 3D.
Personally, I just don’t “get” the novelty. At best, there’s a minute or so in any 3D film that uses it to a reasonable extent. The rest is all pointless.
[…] What browser plugins/extensions do you use? […]
It’s wrong how long in the priority list schools fall. But we work with very unpopular people and we aren’t civil servants (which may be enough info to work out where I do actually work!). When I started working for our current employer 3.5 years ago it was like going back in time to when people were looking at computers with distrust and longing for their typewriters. It’s now managed to move into the 20th century (and managers have blackberries, albeit extremely expensive ones but we’re locked into one service provider so can’t do anything about that) but we can’t even right click on our desktops ffs. Firefox? What’s that? The terminals crash if you plug in a memory stick. (Luckily I’ve managed to wangle a PC.)
Well if the shift+enter thing is supposed to be getting people to post less it’s completely backfired, people are STILL bitching about it every time they forget which obviously generates far more content than would have been there otherwise. In fact how on earth would this EVER cut the amount of content generated??? And yes it’s insane that they never told anyone. And sometimes I forget how much I hate fb 🙂
I thought you’d have something to say about the 3D thing. Makes perfect sense.
We’re lucky we can put memory sticks into the computers – in fact we can also save files to the desktop here which we couldn’t at my last school. This is handy as the space allotted on the server per pupil is pitiful and would make doing the Media course I teach (involving video editing) impossible.
However, if a computer fails – and they do – all the files on the desktop are wiped as part of the rebuild. At the previous school they couldn’t save anything on the computers so when the pupils were studying animation they had to be issued with memory sticks to use as workspace. Very slow and clunky.
Oh, and a 40Mb limit for staff email accounts? For my head of department this amounts to maybe 2 days traffic so he stores all his emails locally, totally defeating the purpose of having a networked mailbox.
Our email limit is 36mb. I win!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Although I used to have a job where I regularly got emails that made me exceed my limit so can get up to about 50mb – I haven’t pointed this out to anyone yet! I once nearly crashed the entire system by sending out a letter to all users [had been instructed to do so by a senior manager] and got the head of IT telling me to go and talk to him first if anyone told me to do the same thing again. He was surprisingly nice about it considering the problems it caused – it wasn’t my fault but we all know that often doesn’t matter!)
(to be fair the limit might have been raised now but i haven’t heard anything about it if it has)
We routinely get sent emails which warn us we’re getting close to our quote. Which, themselves, take up space which pushes us closer to quote. It’s like the bank fining you money for going over your overdraft. Utterly stupid.
I was helping one of the maths staff send an email a few weeks ago and converted his Word 2007 document into RTF so everyone could read it. I didn’t check the size of the resulting file – which he sent to every member of staff.
Oops.
well at least it was him that sent it and not you 🙂
and yep, that’s pretty frustrating – but so is not realising you’re nearly at your quota and finding out after 5pm when you need to send an email that night and all the IT helpdesk people have gone home. And you can’t just delete a few emails to get round it, because the IT people have to compact your mailbox once you’ve gone over the limit before you can send anything out.
Ah, we could rant about this all year….
How about the geography teacher who had to send some competition entries to the SQA for her class? Done in PageMaker or something so they were pretty large files. So large that the internal email system wouldn’t let them send as they made her mailbox too full when they went into her outgoing / sent folder.
So I spent about 30 mins shrinking all the pictures and archiving the files so they would *just* send.
Then found that they bounced as the recipient’s mailbox was too full as well.
Ended up taking them home, putting the files onto a file sharing site (inaccessible at school for reasons which only make sense to the power-mad idiots in the IT department) and dropping him a link to them. Which he had to access from his home as well, due to the same restrictions at their end.
At least he was nice about it and accepted the entries even though he got them 2-3 days after the competition deadline due to the muppetry. We’d have been quicker printing them and sending them through the bloody mail.
Oh, and as an aside, why do my employers keep telling all and sundry to follow their Twitter feed and “like” their facebook page when both sites are blocked across all council offices?
Good post. I vote for more geeky posts.
And an interesting set of plugins. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, David. Do note that a few of these are cross-browser. Certainly LastPass and Xmarks work on IE, Opera, Firefox and Chrome – I don’t even know if Safari takes extensions or plug-ins though.
I’d do more geeky posts if I had more ideas of what to write. Although I’m tempted to put my Scratch “Ghostbusters” game up. I wrote it last week to show Scratch off to the resident 10 year old and she was quite impressed!
all completely ridiculous. and yet noone seems to care.