Tag Archives: Google Chrome

4 Awesome Extensions to Block Sites in Chrome

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We all spend a lot of time being online. On social networking sites, watching videos, reading news posts, etc. And one link leads to another and it goes on. We don’t realize how time passes, and we shut down, leaving works unfinished. Literally it happens every day, and we are left with pile of unfinished tasks. Few of you might able to manage to a certain extent. But to make this extremely easy, consider having one of these Google Chrome extensions installed in your Chrome.

1. StayFocused

Stayfocusd This extension makes you inaccessible to chosen sites by blocking them. Even you can block web content which you tend to open in the browser. You can allot time how much you want to spend on particular sites. And when the time you allotted passed, it will be blocked for the rest of the day. So you can focus and finish your work.

Be aware that it will not let you even change the setting to get the access to that particular site which was blocked for the day, for that you have to disable the extension. You can even block all the websites for few minutes or hours at “The Nuclear Option”, without adding the sites to the blocked list at “Blocked Sites”. And it doesn’t seem to have the feature to block a site for multiple time periods like “Nanny for Google Chrome” yet.

2. Block Site with Time Alarm

Block Site with Time Alarm

This extension let you set the maximum amount of time you want to spend for each website. It has three options to block. First one is to block the site entirely. Second one is to get access by completing a hard task, which might make you abstain from getting the access to the site. And third one is up to you, by getting desktop notifications to stop.

The issue here is once you are blocked, you cannot extend the time. And time set to spend on the site is same for everyday, you cannot customize the allowed time on various days of a week.

3. Nanny for Google Chrome

With this extension you can block URLs for multiple time periods in a day or set maximum time up to 60 minutes in a day. Also you can set for which day you want to be blocked unlike others.

Reviewer claim that the time constraint set, doesn’t work properly sometimes. They also claim that when they set maximum time for a site to block, it doesn’t work and get blocked instantly. So, when you set a maximum time limit, you also need to set a time period in order to get it right. And when you use the option of multiple time periods in a day, then don’t set maximum time period. So try it out finding the bugs.

4. No Procrastination

A simple one. You can block a complete domain or a specific URL. And anytime you can pause and get access unlike others.

We are using StayFocusd and also highly recommend it for stubborn procrastinators.

Have the best one installed for you. Or try all of these and let us know which one you liked the most? In next articles, we are coming with more extensions of Google Chrome to increase your browser’s usability.

Search Realtime with Google and Twitter Together

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Google Twitter SearchWhat do you do if you want to find up-to-the-minute information? Twitter is known for instantaneity and Google for relevance. How about mixing best of both the worlds? How about being the first one to receive authorized and updated breaking news?

Back in 2009, Google made a deal with Twitter where they have access to all the public tweets. And these updated tweets appeared before the results related to your search query. Google then called it realtime search. The deal sounded promising and later Google released specialized site google.com/realtime for people looking for latest and fresh information. However, they closed this feature within a year with the launch of Google+ while trying to figure out ways to incorporate and promote G+ activities.

[Interesting: Before Google's could sign a deal with Twitter, we already have covered other ways to get real time twitter updates on Google]

Now, until Google comes up with real time G+ integrated results, we have found out few worthy alternatives to get latest results by mixing Twitter search in Google:

1. HashPlug (Chrome Extension)

Developed by an India based startup, HashPlug seamlessly integrates Twitter realtime search results into Google search results page. The design placement is unobtrusive and user friendly but pushes knowledge graph to the bottom of the page (if present).

Results from Twitter search are slightly delayed and space is left as it is if there are no real time updates or no results from twitter. Also you can also favorite, reply or retweet from the Google search page itself. Unfortunately, it is available only for Chrome.

In conclusion, this handy extension comes to real use for time limited or breaking news searches. Get it from here.

2. Twootles

twootles

Twootles is an old style mashup site which displays real time twitter results simultaneously with Google results in the sidebar. It fails in aesthetics and functionality features of HashPlug but scores big in compatibility. Since it is a website, you can use it everywhere including mobiles. Try it here.

3. Heapr

This webapp lets you search Google, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia at the same time. The search mashup is badly designed but lets you separate results by sites, images and videos. Also, you must have Chrome or Firefox to use this app as it does not work on mobile or IE. Try out here.

Tell us in comments if you know any such other services or which among the listed ones you would love to use?

Happy 4th Birthday, Google Chrome!

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Although it may seem that too little time has passed, now Chrome web-browser is celebrating its 4th birthday with great news, related to its acquired status of the most widely-used one among the rivals.

To say, such considerable growth in popularity has been affected by multiple factors and hasn’t happened in a moment, of course. To start with, the overall users’ love towards Google and its products couldn’t but influence the increase of Chrome’s fame, and the more well-known the whole company became with time, the more highly appreciated its featured web-browser got.

Moreover, no matter what Firefox fans and admirers might state, for instance, Chrome is, undoubtedly, convenient in usage. It’s got intuitive interface and is rather simple to customize, depending on one’s personal preferences.

Furthermore, it’s also due to the efficient marketing strategy, which led Google Chrome to the top. Not only hilarious Google Doodles attract our attention every time each brand-new of them is presented, but the somewhat irritating offer to select the browser as the default one turns out to really be working.

To celebrate their 4th anniversary, the Chrome team has also launched interactive timeline to showcase their innovations and progress since inception.

All things considered, it has taken the whole 4 years for one of Google’s most successful products to become this prominent in different parts of the world, and even the most skeptic analysts won’t argue that such state of things is absolutely justified. As for us, users, it all starts and ends up with overall benefits we get, so apparently Chrome has got more advantages, than its competitors, if we choose it to access our online services, like Facebook, Twitter, 4shared, New York Times or any other news web-pages.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Chrome!

How to Change User Agent String in Chrome

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Very often old websites does not work in Chrome and asks you specifically to use IE or Firefox. Many a times you would like to change the user agent string in Google Chrome either to check the mobile version of the site on your desktop or to try out it with different browser platforms. Until now, there was no easy way to change the site behaviour, but now with the new Chrome versions, we can alter it either with command line or by chrome extension or from developer tools.

For those of you unfamiliar, User Agent String is an identity text sent by internet browser to the site server to tell about the platform on which the site will be displayed. For example, if my user agent is of mobile then I will see the mobile version of the site even if I am using desktop browser. This is an incredibly useful method to properly run some of the websites that only work in few browsers.

Here are the two convenient ways to switch user agent:

Easiest way: Use Chrome Extension User-Agent Switcher

user agent switcher chrome extension

Works only with Dev Chrome 17 or higher versions, this extension is offers extremely easy way to switch user agents. You can choose from Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, iPhone, iPad and Android.

For those who do not have latest Chrome version, they can download the same extension from Author’s site. But to install it you will have to first enable “Experimental Extension APIs” from the about:flags page and then restart the browser.

Though Chrome extension is the easiest way to change the string, unfortunately it works with the latest versions only. On the other hand, there is great news that in the upcoming versions, you can change the user agent right from the developer tools. Just hit Ctrl+Shift+i on Windows/Linux, Command+Option+i on Mac OS X and click settings on the bottom right of the window. Now check the box “override user agent” and select one of the given options or enter your self-made custom agent.

Developer tool in Chrome canary

Permanently Change User Agent to Stimulate iPhone Browser

If you add a user agent command line parameter, then you can have permanent iPhone browser behaviour in all the tabs. Follow these steps to stimulate this change:

1) Right click on the Chrome icon. Select Properties.
2) Add the following text after the pre-existing text written in the Target box –

–user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3″

Google Chrome Properties box

3) Click OK and restart the browser.

Now, for all the sites that you open will have iPhone optimized behaviour meaning mobile version with different features, layout and style.

Tell us in your comments about how changing user agent benefitted you or if you have a better way of doing switching them.

Google’s Most Popular Search Terms in 2011 – The Zeitgeist Data

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Are you interested in knowing what grabbed world’s attention in 2011? What were the most popular search terms in 2011? Which celebrity or about which movie people wanted to know more? What did the world cared about this year? Google is ready with all these answers in into annual Zeitgeist 2011 data.

There are more than 1 billion searches each day on Google of which 20% are new terms for the day [source]. Analysing this search data, each year Google comes up with Zeitgeist, meaning the spirit of the times which is aggregation of millions of queries Google receives each day. Here is a beautiful and emotional video “We Made it” presenting the summary of the entire released list.

In comparison to other years, this year zeitgeist site is more interactive and aesthetic with CSS3 and HTML5. Even the fastest rising list is more surprising than ever. Rebecca Black with her awful song Friday makes to the top, followed by the most promoted product of the year, the Google Plus. Majority of the list is hijacked by American individuals and only Japanese nuclear plant accident made it to 8th number. Not to surprisingly, 3 spots where captured by Apple and Google secured only one. Some other important snapshots of the released data are:

#. Myspace is the worlds fasted falling search query. This is slightly anticipated because of the fact that Facebook has 800 million users and Google Plus is caching on.

#. Amazon Kindle Fire attracted more attention than iPhone 4S in fasted rising consumer electronics.

#. Facebook is fasted rising search in India leaving behind Cricket World cup 2011.

#. Anna Hazare followed by Poonam Pandey were the fasted rising people for India.

#. Katrina Kaif is still the most searched person from India after Anna Hazare.

#.. Bodyguard left behind Ra.One in Indian Bollywood film industry.

Interested in knowing more? Check out previous year zeitgeist data from here.

A Better Chrome Extension Manager

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Along with the latest version of Chrome, Google has made significant changes to the in-built extension manager. However, if you install too many extensions then managing them becomes a pain. They take up significant space next to address bar (Omnibox), each one has a separate options page and it is difficult to update them. There is also no easy way to search, update or change options for them.

Enter Extensions Manager (aka Switcher). This chrome extension handles all your concerns with a pop-up that provides all management options together in a box. You can quickly enable/disable, update, and uninstall apps, themes and extensions. It provides an easy way to access options page for all the items. Each one is displayed with its name, version number and description. Clicking on the name takes you to Webstore page of that extension.

extension manager

Another good feature of this extension in comparison to regular inbuilt manager is the ability to separate extensions based on their statuses. You have different tabs for enabled, disabled, out-dated and recently installed ones. In addition, you have different tabs for extensions, applications and themes. This tabbed layout saves you trouble from finding that particular extension among many others.

html5 notification

Natively Chrome allows you to have only one theme at a time. But with this app you can have multiple themes installed and select them on the fly. Another cool feature is the HTML5 notifications just like the new mail or chat notification in Gmail. Notification help you instantly know what is going on with what extension.

This extension is better than the native manager is and it is very useful especially for those who love to have many extensions. [Install it from the Chrome Webstore]

Awesome New Tab Page Puts Windows Metro UI in Chrome

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Do you feel Chrome’s new page tab design is boring? Then you must see our previous post on 5 beautiful Chrome new tab extensions. A new addition to this list is Windows 8 Metro UI inspired, widget based aNTP or Awesome New Tab Page.

Awesome new page tab extension

aNTP is fully customizable with widgets, apps, icons, bookmarks and colours. It has bright and rich colours in neatly arranged boxes. You can rearrange these blocks with simple drag-and-drop action as per your choice. It is fairly easy to add, delete and fit these boxes anywhere on the page. The awesomeness comes from the fact that there are no icons but dynamic and interactive widgets on new tab. You can also make custom website shortcuts just like apps by your own.

However, there are some limitations with this Chrome extension. Currently, it is a developers preview extension and may have few bugs. In addition, it is very new and there are not enough widgets available for it. Nevertheless, new supporting widgets in form of extensions are being added to the gallery on regular basis by other developers.

Overall, aNTP is a beautiful shelf and comes along [by default] with weather, RSS and clock widgets which you can obviously increase. Worth a try!

Find and Remove Inactive Users in your Google+ Circles

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uncircle from google plusUncircle+ is a new Chrome extension that allows you to quickly find and remove inactive users from your Google+ Circles. This is an easy way to clean up your Circles and have more room to add new interesting people.

How to use Uncircle+?

  • Install Uncircle+ from its page on Chrome Web Store.
  • Once installed, you should see the new Uncircle+ icon in the browser toolbar. Click on it.
  • Now Uncircle+ will open up in a new tab and do an initial scan of all people you have in your Circles. If you have circled many people, this can take a few minutes to complete. You can see scan progress in the activity box at the top.
  • Once complete, it will populate the “All People In Your Circles” box with all found users. The “I” seen in the activity box mean Inactive, “E” means Error, and active users are indicated with “.”(dots).

  • Now, click on “Find Inactive People!” to find users with no posts at all on Google+. Again, this may take some time depending on the number of people you have in your Circles. If you want, you can stop the scan in between by clicking on the “Stop Finding!” button.
  • After the scan gets done, you will find all inactive users in the “Inactive People” box. From here you can select the users you wish to remove and click “Remove selected” to complete the process.

  • Removed users are shown in the “Removed Successfully From All Circles” box.

You can repeat this process anytime you wish to weed out more unwanted users.

Install: Uncircle+

Additional Tip: Use Untweeps or Twitoria to find and unfollow inactive people on Twitter.

Watch YouTube Videos While Working on Desktop Applications

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Picture-In-Picture For YouTube is an lesser known extension for Google Chrome that gives you a fair easy way to watch YouTube videos while browsing other websites and even when you are working on desktop applications.

Picture-In-Picture For YouTube
Once installed, the extension adds a new ‘PIP’ button, next to the existing Share button, on every YouTube video page.

Picture-In-Picture YouTube button

When you click on that newly added PIP button, the video will immediately appear as a small pop-up on the corner of your screen. PIP uses Chrome’s notification system, so you will have to allow desktop notifications from YouTube for the very first time.

As it Chrome notification technique, the video window is not that flexible. You cannot change its size, nor can you place it anywhere on the screen by dragging. Though you can control the window’s corner position on screen. To do this, click on the small wrench icon on the window and choose “Choose position”.

As for the player itself, you can pause and play the video by clicking on it. And once the video has finished playing, you can replay it by clicking on it again.

Multiple videos in Picture-In-Picture

You can use PIP to watch up to four videos at the same time. Each video is stacked on top of the other, and if you continue to add more videos with four already on your desktop, the rest will be queued to play when you close any of the four window.

While the video is running you can close the YouTube tab and open just about any program or application and the videos will remain on top, but you can’t close Chrome of course.

Overall, this is a useful extension to keep YouTube videos on top of windows and work simultaneously. The extension works seamlessly and it is quite enjoyable to watch videos, even in such a small window.

Note: The extension currently works only with those YouTube videos that can be embedded. And it even works in Incognito mode.

Install: Picture-In-Picture For YouTube

Resize and Style Google Chrome Scroll bar without Extension

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Styled Chrome Scroll barThere are various extensions available in the Web Store to decorate their Chrome installation. [See 5 ultra-useful new tab extensions]. One extension that I found really good to stylize my chrome’s default scroll bar and that give me that little bit of extra screen space or just for the joy of personalizing is Simple Scroll Bar X. This looked good but while installing it chrome warned me that it can access all my websites data. Moreover, if you’re like me and don’t like installing extensions for every small thing, you can easily achieve the same result by simply editing Chrome’s Custom.css file.

You can find it at the following location:

Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css

Mac:
/Users/YourUsername/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Ubuntu:
~/.config/chromium/Default/User\ StyleSheets/Custom.css

Once located, open it in a text editor and add the following code:

::-webkit-scrollbar-track-piece{
	background-color:#fff;
	-webkit-border-radius:0;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar{
	width:8px;
	height:8px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb{
	height:50px;
	background-color:#999;
	-webkit-border-radius:4px;
	outline:2px solid #fff;
	outline-offset:-2px;
	border: 2px solid #fff;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb:hover{
	height:50px;
	background-color:#9f9f9f;
	-webkit-border-radius:4px;
}

Save the file and reload your tabs to see the change.

As you can see it’s basic CSS so, if you wish, you can easily modify the code to your liking. For example, if you find the scroll bar too thin change its width by editing this part:

::-webkit-scrollbar{
	width:16px;
}

You should be able to see this styled scroll bar on all pages, including scroll bars within a page.

Manually customizing your browser by editing style sheet, instead of installing extensions, eradicates the risk of someone tracking your browsing history and it is also less intensive on system resources.

If you’d like to further customize Chrome, check out this post on styling the Web Inspector.