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.

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.