Category: Browsers

Take the awesome power of Wolfram Alpha; add the convenience and intelligence of Google's built-in calculator. Now mix them up and serve in a piping hot Chrome add-on: Chromey Calculator. When you click the extension's humble button, it opens a quick prompt pane (you can also pop it out to its own separate Chrome window). You can then feed it with any expression Wolfram Alpha or Google Calculator ...

Back in 2008, Lee covered SiteLauncher for Firefox. It's a simple add-on that provides you with a customizable "shortcut panel" for your favorite websites. SiteLauncher for Chrome provides basically the same service, but for Google's browser. I've been using it for a few days now, and while it's not perfect, it's still very handy. Pros: When it works, it really does provide single-keystroke ...

One of my favorite Gmail features is the ability to drag-and-drop attachments onto email messages. That's so cool! There's no more browsing for files – the whole thing feels much more like a desktop app. drag2up is a Chrome add-on that aspires to bring that same functionality to the whole Web. It's super-cool – when it works. I've selected the screenshot above for that exact reason. ...

In yesterday's copy of the Los Angeles Times, a print version of Google's new 20 Things e-book has been found. The clipping relates to the Cloud Computing chapter of the book, but the chapter number doesn't match up. This is an obvious, and genius step for Google. Not only are they capitalizing on the book's great illustrations, but they're also dragging the untechnological masses kicking and ...

Lest you think blogger Long Zheng is all about Microsoft apps, our Australian friend has a keen eye on all kinds of bleeding-edge software. -- including Firefox 4. Today he noticed a change in the Firefox 4 nightly build -- sexier, semi-translucent alert dialogs, complete with a blur effect to obscure the webpage content in the background. The new alerts fit well with Firefox 4's default ...

Auto HD for YouTube is a fairly simple Chrome add-on, which has a similar function to the many Greasemonkey scripts that do the same thing: it makes YouTube default to high-quality playback. I've tried it out, and here are some quick thoughts: No auto buffering: Sadly, this add-on doesn't change YouTube's default behavior, which is to just start playing the video rather than buffer and wait ...

Once again, don't get your hopes up too much if you see the orange-yellow dot on your Google Chrome wrench icon today -- there are updates for both the Beta and Dev channels, but most of the changes aren't forward-facing. There are, however, some behind-the-scenes updates that are worth knowing about. On the Beta Channel, several Web Store related fixes were pushed. Access to Chrome's private ...

20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web is a beautiful and educational example of what we can expect from the HTML5 Web. It was developed by the Google Chrome team to showcase both the power of its browser, and of HTML5 itself. 20 Things is fully illustrated, too, and on each page a cheesy subtitle or piece of poetry awaits. Put simply, it's a delight. If you're a hardened Web expert, ...

Apple's latest update to Safari, Safari 5.0.3, fixes some Flash and JavaScript plug-in issues, but the most important fix can be found in the address bar. Yes, Apple has finally fixed the absolutely obnoxious behavior of Safari's address bar autocomplete, which used to suggest sites based on page titles and headlines rather than by URL. The address bar now prefers your bookmarked websites ...

Not everyone uses Google Reader; some people (a dying breed, perhaps) like to consume their RSS feeds locally, using a desktop feed reader. Firefox has long had a Live Bookmarks feature that gave it some of those "desktop feed reader" powers: Live Bookmarks understands RSS, and it can always show you a list of a website's most recent headlines. RSS Live Links brings just that sort of ...

I've recently been spending more and more time in Chrome, and I'm very impressed. One of the things I needed was a way to execute arbitrary bits of JavaScript (bookmarklets and other tidbits) using keystrokes. This is useful because it lets me control Chrome using AutoHotkey, and do all sorts of other things. The solution I found is called Shortcut Manager, and it's a Chrome extension that goes ...

As of a few moments ago, you can now download Platform Preview 7 of Internet Explorer 9. The main focus of this update is the continued enhancement of the Chakra JavaScript engine; as a result, IE9 now leads the SunSpider benchmark by a few percent. Like its predecessors, this preview lacks any kind of useful UI -- but if you have the Beta installed, you can follow Lee's guide to hack the Beta ...

Camino, the Mac-only cousin of Firefox, has just been updated to 2.0.6, bringing with it outdated Flash plug-in version checking. Given that many security vulnerabilities revolve around Flash player exploits these days, having the browser check for Flash updates and taking the burden off the user is probably a very good thing. The update also brings with it the latest 1.9.0 version of Mozilla ...

Here's an operation I need to do quite often: copy both the page title and its URL. For some reason, neither Firefox nor Chrome provides a way to do this in one fell swoop. I need to activate the address bar in order to copy the URL, and I'm not even sure there's a way to copy the page title (I usually just type it out manually). Copy Fixer is an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that provides a ...

Browser Plus is a new application for Windows Phone 7 devices that brings tabbed browsing support and an incognito mode to Microsoft's Internet Explorer for WP7. This is not a new browser, mind you -- it uses IE's rendering engine and adds new features to it. Tabs work exactly as you'd expect, and the tab bar is located between the address bar and the rendered page. Adding or closing a tab is ...