Google Chrome is a superior browser to any i’ve used in the past 10 years or so, simply based on its performance. Firefox is great, but i’m not interested in all the add-ons and such that slow a browser down.

What I’m interested in is performance.  As i scower through the web with my many tabs open i want to be able to interact with them quickly as i cycle and rearrange tab by tab.

No other browser has yet given me the ability to browse the web the way Google Chrome has.   Firefox doesn’t even come close when it comes down to the tiniest little details. Lets talk about those details, see if you agree with me?

Chrome: If you want to restore browsing sessions anytime—and not just after a browser crash—Session Buddy for Chrome easily creates custom sessions and restores them whenever you wish.

After installing Session Buddy, clicking on the Session Buddy link in the Chrome toolbar brings up all your current Chrome windows and open tabs. From there you can save entire sessions or selectively edit out tabs from the list before saving. Saved sessions appear to the left of the current session list and remain until manually deleted.

You can use Session Buddy for something as simple as automatically saving your current session on browser close—available in the options menu—or for making custom session lists for various tasks like reading your favorite sites every morning or opening all the sites you use for bill paying.

Session Buddy is free and works wherever Chrome does. Have a favorite Chrome extension to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Whenever we talk passwords, we always preach the same thing: Use strong, difficult-to-remember passwords, and different passwords for every site. Easy to say, extremely difficult to do through sheer willpower. I've tried many password-remembering systems, and this is what I've stuck with.

To paraphrase photographer Chase Jarvis, the best password manager is the one you have with you. Of all the password management utilities out there, I consider LastPass the most elegant compromise between convenience and security, and if you're not using it already, I recommend you start. It's mostly free, plugs into nearly any browser or smartphone, is KeePass compatible, and just works.

URL stands for abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator which is the global address of web pages, documents or other services. It consists of two main parts: one is protocol identifier and second is document address in from of domain name or IP. They are separated by a colon “:” and two forward slashes “//”. URL needs to be unique which may result in a longer URL as the World Wide Web is growing at an exponential scale. Also there is a tendency to pass descriptive attributes in the URL to forward different kinds of information. This may result in awful situation where URL looks ugly and can’t fit in Human Memory.

The solution produced to tackle the problem is URL Shortening which takes long URL addresses as input and outputs a unique and short URL. This short URL actually redirects you to the original web page. The URL shortening services became even more constructive with the popularity of micro blogging service known as Twitter which imposes a limit on maximum messages in a character. bit.ly is by far the most popular URL shortening service. The convenience of URL shortening services has pushed Google to launch goo.gl and youtube.be while Facebook to start fb.me.

It solely depends upon you which one you prefer for URL shortening. During web browsing on Google Chrome, you may need to shorten URLs quite often. Instead of moving to service’s webpage, you can use following extensions in Google Chrome for time saving.
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ChromeMUSE
This extension serves the both purposes.

• Shortening long URLs
• Expanding short URLs

It supports many popular URL shortening services. By default, goo.gl is enabled which can be configured from extension’s options. A favicon appears at the end of address bar. A click on the icon will short the URL according to preferences. This short URL is automatically placed in clipboard and can be pasted anywhere. The notable URL shortening services which can be chosen are bit.ly, is.gd, and TinyURL.

If you browse to a web page where shortened URLs are present, this extension will involuntarily expand the URLs. The titles and destination are shown when you move mouse cursor over the short URL.

You can configure ChromeMUSE to show a list of desired URL shortening services when you click the icon. Besides, the extension can be set to replace the short URL with actual URL after expansion.

Computer Mouse is really helpful for a normal computer user because it provides an easy way to navigate. It becomes even more convenient when browsing web. The user can easily select links, images, or text in a web page. Despite this functionality, there is some more juice which can be extracted from computer mouse. As a result, Mouse Gestures have been developed to provide more functionality. Mouse Gestures functionality is available as a utility for operating systems like Windows XP or they are available in modern web browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

I will review here best available Google Chrome’s Extension which let you use mouse gestures. If you are using Mouse Gestures for the first time then it should not be a problem but users who have migrated from Mozilla Firefox may feel some irritation in using the solutions as the solutions are not fit when compared to the mouse gesturing add-ons developed for Firefox.

Smooth Gestures
This extension works almost perfect. There are a plenty of already built gestures available. These gestures can be identified from extension’s options page and they are also customizable. Mouse Stroke supports and recognizes three types of gestures.

Simple Gesture: Draw a gesture by moving the mouse while pressing the right mouse button and then release
Scroll Gesture: Scroll the mouse wheel while pressing down right button
Rocker Gesture: Hold down either the right or left mouse button, and then press the other one.

The default mouse gestures provided by this extension are divided into three categories which are Page Navigation, Tab Management, and Miscellaneous. These mouse strokes almost will satisfy needs of any user. Any gesture can be disabled or modified. The modification is pretty straight forward.  When you will click on “+” sign, a canvas will be shown on which you can draw your own stroke for specified task. If the gesture already exists, it will show a warning. You can ignore it and over write the gesture or re draw.

Tabbed interface in web browsers boost the user experience in many ways. The user does not need to switch between separate windows. All of the browsing can occur in a single window which makes shifting between different web pages more convenient. You can even browse a website and the related links in a different window while other browsing activity may take place in a separate browser window.

Each web browser has its own policy of ordering tabs. It is difficult to get accustomed with tab ordering if the user switches from one web browser to another. This is the case when someone is migrating to Google Chrome from Mozilla Firefox. Some prominent differences between the tab ordering strategy of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are regarding

• Position of New Tab.
• Which Tab should be active upon closing a Tab.

Some solutions in form of extensions have been developed which replicate the tab ordering Policy of Firefox in Google Chrome. This makes the migration of users from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome trouble-free.

Also take a look at: How to Manage Tabs in Google Chrome with Extensions

Tabs Plus
This extension changes tab ordering of Google Chrome to work like Firefox. The behavior can be changed from options.  Position of New Tab can be fixed to Default, First, or Last. You can also opt whether to open new tab in background or foreground. If an active tab is closed, the tab which was used last time will get active. If a specific tab is required not to be considered as Last Used Tab, it can be excluded.

Tab Stack
It is a useful extension with nice feature which moves tabs in a way that they are always arranged in a Most Recently Used order from left to right. In this way, the most recent active tab is always at left of tab strip. When you will use Ctrl-Tab key combination to navigate through tabs, it will work like Alt-Tab combination in Windows. The most recently active tab will be visible.

These extensions will modify the tab ordering strategy of Google Chrome so that the migrating users from Mozilla Firefox can feel at Home.

Graphical User Interface is meant to facilitate the interaction of user with the device in a graphical way rather than typing in a command line. GUI has got matured with overall system development of computers. A window manager is an essential part that controls the placement and appearance of windows in a GUI. Tabs were a significant inclusion in a window. Tabs allow an application to contain multiple documents in a single window. This eases the way to switch between different instances of application.

Tabs became famous when they were introduced in web browsers. The user can effortlessly navigate between different web pages. The developers have introduced different particular functions for tabs in web browser. These functions may vary from browser to browser. Google Chrome is the new rival in the war of web browsers and outperformed many web browser. It is because of its speed and spectacular tabbed window interface. Its brilliant tabbed interface has pushed developers of Mozilla Firefox to employ almost similar concept in the next major upgrade of web browser. Google Chrome allows users to arrange and organize tabs easily and efficiently. Still the functionality of tabs can be enhanced in many ways to alleviate the web surfers. To serve this purpose, there have been many nice extensions developed which will be listed here.

Tab Menu
If you are used to open a large number of tabs, it leads to a cluttered tab strip. In this case the viewer is not able to identify the web page as the titles in tab squeezes and become invisible. In a less messy scenario, the user may identify a page by its favicon but there may be pages that don’t have any favicon. Tab menu extension for Google Chrome rescues you in such a situation. It displays a vertical menu which contains all open tabs. The user can easily navigate through the menu with keyboard and mouse. The tabs can be searched, opened, or closed easily.  There is a shortcut key (Ctrl+M) available which opens the tab menu in a new tab for better view and navigation. Tab Menu option will let you modify this shortcut key and configure display of tab counter. Also if there are multiple instances of Google Chrome windows, they can be merged from options.

Google Chrome: If you've recently moved from Firefox to Chrome, you probably miss the way that Firefox orders tabs. This small Google Chrome extension switches the tab ordering in Chrome to mimic how Firefox handles new tabs.

The default behavior for Chrome is to group tabs together—new tabs open relative their parent tab. If you prefer new tabs to open at the end of the row in the order in which you have opened them, as they do in Firefox, Modified Tab Ordering can make that happen.

In the screenshot above you can see how we opened Chrome, visited Lifehacker.com, then Google, and then returned to the original tab to open a few links from Lifehacker—all the new tabs appeared at the end of the row as they opened instead of appearing, grouped, beside the original Lifehacker tab. It's a small tweak, but if you've got a routine for how you open tabs and read them a little thing like the order they appear in can really throw you off. Note: As several sharp-eyed readers pointed out, as of version 3.6 Firefox has adopted grouped tabs instead of ordered tabs. This extension gives you the old-school-Firefox experience in Chrome for those who prefer ordered tabs over grouped ones.

Google has just launched a new program aimed at improving security for its new web browser, Google Chrome. Developers who find a bug in either Chrome or Chromium, the open source codebase used as the testing grounds for Chrome, will receive anywhere from $500 to $1337 for reporting the issue. The amount of the reward will vary depending on the severity of the security hole discovered, says Google. Those bugs deemed "particularly severe or particularly clever" will receive the higher amount.

Plenty of researchers have contributed to the Chromium project thus far for free, and to them Google hopes this new program will serve as a token of appreciation for their ongoing efforts. However, the introduction of monetary rewards is meant to encourage more participation in the community from external sources who have not yet pitched in.

The concept for an incentive program is not new, as Google notes in their blog post. It's based on a similar venture created by the folks at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser. Like Mozilla, Google's rewards also start at $500 for most issues. The payment of $1337, the number a nod to the geeky internet slang called "leet speak," will be reserved only for critical bugs that would have had a major impact if left unpatched.

Firefox 3.6 is out, Chrome's stable version got a big upgrade, and Opera 10.5 is inching toward release. It's a great time for us to break out the timer, process manager, and code tracker for some up-to-date browser speed tests.

This go-round, we did things just slightly different from our last batch of browser tests.

Windows only: Portable utility FlashCookiesView displays a list of those hidden Flash cookies that web sites use to track where you are going, and allows you to easily delete them.

We've already explained how to clean up Flash cookies in our guide to browsing without leaving a trace, but FlashCookiesView makes viewing and deleting the cookies extremely simple no matter what browser you're using—just open the utility, and you'll see a list of cookies you can view or delete. You'll want to note that even when you use private browsing mode, Flash cookies are still tracking you across sessions—in the screenshot above, the offending cookie was generated in Google Chrome's private browsing mode.

FlashCookiesView is a free download for Windows only, but be sure to read our guide to browsing without a trace for an automated method to clean them up.

If you're running Chrome or Safari as your main browser, Google's now offering up YouTube videos without Flash. That's right—fewer system hangs, browser crashes, and other issues, and just straight-up video through HTML5 standards.

Google has previously allowed Chrome, Safari, and Internet-Explorer-using-Chrome-Frame browsers to try out a few HTML5 video demos at its site, but now Google's given you the option to always play videos through the h.264 codec, if they're available. If they have ads, or aren't available in h.264, YouTube will serve up the standard Flash player—though that's been upgraded, too, with a nice video format chooser in the lower-right corner.

The notable missing piece here is Firefox. Firefox does support HTML5's video streaming through Ogg Theora, a non-patented, license-free codec that its makers consider more free, while Google, and Apple, have moved their sites and browsers toward supporting h.264 streaming.

Windows/Mac/Linux (Chrome): It's okay to fit a little social networking and not-quite-job-related news reading into your day, but mental limits are hard to stick to. StayFocusd sets timers on the sites you know are addictive, then blocks them when time's up.

Rather than set individual time limits for each site, StayFocusd asks for a total amount of time you want to let yourself spend on all your non-productive sites. Kind of a clever restriction to have, because you just know you'd be heading right over to Twitter once your Facebook timer ran out, and vice-versa. StayFocusd does get specific on site URLs, though. You can timer-block the entirety of Reddit, for example, but leave the link submission section open for use throughout the day.

StayFocusd is a free download, works wherever Chrome Extensions do. For a similar strategy of blocking and controlling time-sink sites on Firefox, check out our guide to saving yourself with LeechBlock.

Filed under: Features, Google, Browsers, Lists

The Khronos Group, which is in charge of the tried-and-tested OpenGL framework, has announced that its work with Mozilla to form a 3D Web standard has reached draft standard form. Ladies and gentlemen: WebGL is born!

Draft standards rarely undergo many changes, and most of the important details and unique selling points are now set in stone. There are already nascent, developer versions of WebGL built into beta versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome -- and now, with the draft standard in place, you can expect to see rapid development of both full WebGL support in the browser, and applications that can utilize the new technology.