Chrome: Whatever you use private browsing for, sometimes you want to start your secret browsing from the page you're already on. Incognito This moves your current page to a new incognito window, so you can continue browsing privately without starting from scratch. More »

If you want to to find out more about an image posted on a website in the Chrome browser, your best bet is to either right-click it and use the inspect element context menu option to do so, or to download it to the local computer to analyze it locally.

Inspect element reveals some information about the selected image, including the image’s width and height. What you do not get are additional information, like the file size or mime type.

Image Properties Context Menu is a Google Chrome extension that adds another look-up method to the web browser. The extension adds an Image Properties entry to the image right-click context menu. A selection of that context menu opens the image’s properties in a popup window.

Information displayed in the popup window are the image’s size and dimensions, the location it was found on, the path on the web server, as well as alternate text information and the image’s mime type. The image is also shown in the window. Very large images are shown in full size, with a zoom in and out slider available to adjust the size of it in the image properties window.

Up to two links are displayed in the window as well. First a link to display the data uri, and second a link to display the image’s EXIF data. The latter are only displayed if available obviously.

The Chrome extension is similar in functionality to Firefox’s View Image Feature which displays similar information in the browser when triggered. The native Firefox feature does not link to or display EXIF or Data Uri information though.

Chrome users who switched from Firefox might want to give Image Properties Context Menu if they have used the feature in Firefox, and somewhat missed it in the Chrome browser. The inclusion of EXIF information should make this extension interesting for Chrome users who’d like to find out more about an image or photo that has been posted on the web. While not available for every image, it can reveal interesting information like the location the photo was taken, or the program it has been edited in.

When it comes to writing articles on sites like Ghacks, I sometimes use quotes and links from other sites in articles. While that adds to the information of the article, it also means several copying and pasting operations as the Windows Clipboard can only handle one entry at a time. Clipboard extenders like Ethervane Echo, Clipboard Master or Clipboard Help and Spell.

Browser Clipboard is an extension specifically designed for the Google Chrome browser. It is an official Google extension that has been available in the Chrome Web Store for about a month.

Browser Clipboard works in two different ways. It is first possible to drag and drop text onto the clipboard area that appears at the top of the browser, or use the right-click context menu to add it there.

You see each entry that you have added to the clipboard in the yellow area on top of the browser. This area can be displayed manually with a click on the extension icon that is placed into the browser’s address bar after installation. It also appears automatically once you drag and drop contents in the browser.

Copied items can be pasted via drag and drop into forms on other web pages. These items are removed automatically from the clipboard area by default. A click on the pin icon in front makes them permanent so that they can be used multiple times. Items can be deleted with a click on the remove icon next to them regardless of that settings. It needs to be noted that these clipboard entries are separate from the operating system entries. Also, when you close the browser, the entries are gone.

The options of the extension offer some customization options. You can first move the clipboard area from the top of the screen to one of the sides or the bottom, or make it float on the screen instead. It is furthermore possible to disable the automatic showing of the browser clipboard area when a drag operation is started.

Here is a demonstration video (with a very creepy voice).

Chrome users interested in the extension can download and install Browser Clipboard at the official Chrome Web Store.

Rss news feeds are still one of the best ways to receive updates and news when they happen. When it comes to apps, users have several options at hand. From desktop readers over online services such as Google Reader, to mobile readers and reader extensions for the web browser.

News Factory is a Rss reader extension for the Chrome browser that introduces several interesting new features that the majority of alternatives do not offer in this form. Probably the most interesting feature is that it will automatically parse the history of the browser for news sources, to make the adding of feeds to the reader as comfortable as possible.

Just click on the add button to add a feed to the Rss reader, or use the search form at the top to paste a website url or feed url directly that you want to add.

While that’s a cool way of providing the interested user with a list of feed suggestions, it lacks the option to import existing feeds from an OPML file or other service. But reading dozens or even hundreds of feeds is not what the extension has been designed for anyway.

There is another way of adding feeds that needs to be mentioned here. When you visit a page with a feed, or a feed url directly, you see a button pop up that allows you to add the feed to the reader application.

Feeds can be read with a click on the News Factory icon in the Chrome address bar.  By default, all feeds are mixed together in the interface. You can filter the feed listing to only display a single feed by selecting that feed’s icon in the interface.

You only see partial feeds in the reader. Each item is listed with its title, source, time of posting and the first few lines of text. A click opens the article on the original site in a new tab.

In addition to reading feeds actively, News Factory also displays notifications on the desktop when new items have been posted on monitored sites.

According to the information on the extension’s website, it can also tap into Google Reader feeds if the user is logged into the Google account. The extension is not saving any account data though, which means that users need to make sure they are logged in to use the functionality.

Synchronizing browser data between multiple devices can be a blessing. Imagine having all of your bookmarks and passwords at your disposal, no matter where you go, or what computer you use to connect to the Internet. In reality, syncing is limited in several ways. It first is limited to a specific web browser. You cannot just sync your Firefox data with Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer’s with Opera. While there are third party tools out there that can sync some data, like bookmarks, you won’t find a tool that can synchronize everything.

The second limitation is that you need an account if you use the built-in synchronization features. For Google Chrome, a Google account is required that you need to be signed in for the syncing to work.

Syncing data without Chrome Sync

If you do not want to sign in to your Google account in Chrome, or do not have an account at all, you may be interested in alternatives that help you synchronize data between multiple systems.

To do that, you need two tools:

• A tool to create symbolic links
• Storage space in the cloud that you can access locally (like Dropbox)

The process

Google saves the Chrome user folder into the C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Windows XP users find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\ instead.

All you need to do know is to place that folder in your cloud storage, and point the original data folder to it, to have it synchronized automatically whenever you switch computers. Keep in mind though that will run into issues if you have Chrome open simultaneously on multiple systems. If that is a requirement, you are better off using the built-in synchronization. The process obviously only works for systems that can access the cloud storage.

As far as tools go, you can use Steammover or Dropboxifier for that. Steammover, originally designed for users of the gaming platform Steam who want to move some of their installed games to a new drive, can be used to create symbolic links for all kinds of folders.

You also need a Dropbox account, or a comparable cloud hosting account that you can access as a drive or folder on your system.

Here is how this is done.

Attention: Close all open instances of the Google Chrome browser on your system before you proceed.

Start Steam Mover and select your Google Chrome user directory as the Steam Apps Common Folder, and a new folder in your Dropbox directory as the Alternative Folder.

You should see a folder list being populated once you have selected the Chrome user folder. Now mark all folders with the left mouse button while holding down the Shift key, or press Ctrl-A to do it, and click on the right arrow icon at the bottom of the window afterwards.

Now that you have set it up on one PC, you need to repeat the steps on the remaining devices. Install Dropbox first there to synchronize the Chrome files with the local PC or device.  I’d suggest you empty the directories of your Chrome user directory on those devices before you use Steam Mover to avoid syncing conflicts.

Computer users have several options at their disposal when it comes to note taking. They can take the conventional route and use post-its, paper or any other form of physical notes. While this may be convenient at times, these methods often lack features that computer generated notes offer. It is for instance not possible to sync the notes between devices, edit them without making a mess, or copying them into other applications.

Multiple note taking options are available on the computer. From firing up good old notepad or another plain text editor, to specialized note taking applications like AllMyNotes Organizer to browser extensions.

Mini Notepad is one of those browser extensions for the Google Chrome web browser. The free extension adds a single icon to the browser’s address bar on installation, which displays the extension’s interface on activation.

Note titles are displayed in a sidebar, and generated by default with the date and time they have been created. A click on a note displays the note’s contents. Here it is then possible to enter, delete, copy or paste contents quite comfortably. The note creation date and last modification date are displayed in the lower right corner of the editing area.

New notes can be create with a click on the new notes button in the extension’s interface, or by selecting text on a website, right-clicking the selection afterwards and selecting the Mini Notepad option from the context menu. This pastes the selected text right into the note that is created as part of the process.

Note titles can be edited either by double-clicking on the titles, or using the F2 key when the title is already selected.

I tested the My Chrome Theme yesterday which allowed me to create a custom basic theme for the Chrome browser. It was quite an interesting experience, as it offered options to change the background image and various interface colors. One of the effects was that the default theme was replaced by the custom theme that I created with the help of the extension. After trying the extension for some time, I decided to remove the installed theme again to restore the default theme in the browser. And that’s where the searching for a theme removing option began.

Uninstall Google Chrome Themes

Since I never uninstalled themes before in the browser, I had no clue how to do that. I first tried to find the installed themes in the extensions listing, only to find out that the themes were not listed there. I then started to look through the options to find the setting that would allow me to switch the currently installed theme back to the browser’s default theme.

After some digging in the options I discovered the themes setting under Personal Stuff. It consisted of a single button which would reset the theme of the browser to the default theme when clicked on.

A click on reset to default theme restores the default browser theme.  Since there is no theme listing available in the browser, it appears as if Chrome only keeps a copy of the current theme and the default theme. All other themes seem to be replaced automatically whenever a new theme or the default theme get installed in the browser.

Firefox users have two options when they want to change the default theme of the web browser. They can either install a full theme from the official theme repository, or use Personas Background Themes which only change some aspects of the browser. Chrome users up until now had only the option to install regular themes in their browser. This has changed with the creation of the official My Chrome Theme extension by Google.

My Chrome Theme

Chrome users can use the app to create their own custom theme that is not that different from Firefox’s feature. It takes three configuration steps to create the theme. You select a photo or image from your computer, or use a connected webcam to create an image in the first step. Once you have uploaded the image you can adjust the image’s position if necessary, select to upload a new image, or continue to the next step.

The fit to screen, fill screen and tile image positioning options use the resolution of the monitor, and not of the Chrome window, when selected. Keep that in mind, especially so if you are not running the browser in full screen all the time. One option would be to resize the image as you see fit before you upload it in the browser.

The second step of the process lets you change the following four colors of the browser:

• The New Tab Color
• The Background Tab Color
• The Frame Color
• The Background color.

You need to name your theme in the last step, and can add an optional description as well. A new page opens afterwards with an install button to install the theme locally, and a share url in case you want to share the theme with other Chrome users. Pro tip: Upload a single color image if you only want to change your browser’s frame, tab and background colors.

Theme creation is really easy, and if you manage to get the right image or photo, it can look really nice. Remember that the background image is only shown on new tab pages, which is different from Firefox Personas which is shown in the header. Chrome users who want to give it a swirl can install the My Chrome Theme extension at the official Chrome Web Store. (via Caschy)

 I may be old-fashioned in this regard but I prefer websites and companies to know as little about me as possible, unless the information are used for a service that I make active use of. I do not mind Amazon knowing that I’m an adult male, as this is blocking recommendations and offers aimed at a female audience on the site.

If you are making use of the bookmarks bar in Google Chrome, you probably have noticed that it offers limited space for your important bookmarks and not the best manageability. While it is possible to remove bookmarks from the bar directly, or to add the current page as a new one, you won’t find options in the frontend to swap bookmarks around. For that, you need to open the Chrome bookmarks manager.

Bookmark bar switcher is a Chrome extension that enables multiple bookmark bars in the web browser. This allows you to switch between different sets of directly accessible bookmarks, useful for instance if you use the browser for work and home related tasks, or if you have that many important bookmarks that they do not fit on one bar.

The extension adds an icon to Chrome’s address bar. A left-click displays all bookmark bars that are available, as well as options to create a new bar, and to open the browser’s bookmarks manager.

Only the default bookmark bar with all of its sites is listed there after installation. New bars are created easily from the extension’s context menu. All you need to enter is a name for the new bar, which will then become available as a blank bar in the browser.

You can switch between bars with a left-click on the icon and the selection of one of the available bars. Bookmarks can be added to each bar via drag and drop on the frontend, or in the bookmarks manager.

The bars are listed in a BookmarkBars folder in the bookmarks manager. Each bar is represented by its name for easy identification.

The extension has a few limitations that need to be mentioned here: It is not compatible with bookmark synchronizers, and supports only a limited number of bookmark moves before bookmarks cannot be moved anymore. This is due to Google Chrome’s limitation. A restart should fix the issue though according to the author.

An alternative would be the Chrome Bookmarks Manager which displays all bookmarks and a search option underneath an address bar icon.

Google has just released a public beta version of Google Chrome for Android. Google’s main goal was to port the speed and simplicity of the Chrome browser to mobile devices running on Android. The beta version is only available for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich devices, and currently only in the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.

Android users can download Chrome Beta from Android Market, where it is available for download. A version of the browser has also been downloaded and made available again by members of the XDA-Developer forum.

Chrome for Android Beta ships with some Chrome desktop features, including the browser’s omnibox to search and navigate directly from the browser’s address bar, a tab driven interface, and the private browsing mode (incognito mode). Other features of the desktop version, like themes and extensions support are currently not available in the beta client.

I have made the full switch to listening exclusively to Internet Radio stations many years ago. The core reasons? Accessibility while working on the PC, less ads and talking while songs are playing, and better recording possibilities (see our StreamWriter review for an excellent program that can be used for that purpose.

I usually use desktop media players like AIMP3 to listen to Internet Radio stations, as it is a lot more comfortable than having to keep a streaming page open all the time in the web browser. That’s especially true if you have to restart the browser every now and then.

Radio Player Live is an excellent Chrome extension that offers a great radio listening experience for Chrome users. First time users need to add at least one station to the extension before they start accessing the selected stations via the extension’s Chrome address bar button.

This is done on the extension’s page. A click on Add radio stations lists all the available options. Users can add a station from the gallery listing maintained by the extension developers, add stations from popular sites such as the Shoutcast directory or Digitally Imported, or add stations manually.

All stations from the gallery can be added with a single click of the mouse button. They list many terrestrial stations, like RTL and RTL2, Virgin Radio, BBC 1 to BBC 6 or .977.

Third party stations lead to websites from where the stations need to be added. The extension adds buttons next to each station on those sites which can be used to add the selected radio station to the extension.

A click on the Radio Player Live button loads an overlay prompt to add the selected station to the radio player. The station’s name, website, logo and category can be customized here.

The station can then be selected via the extension’s button in the Chrome interface. Stations can be sorted into categories for easier identification. You can do that when you add a station, or later on under Manage my stations in the program options.

Users who do not like the theme can modify it extensively in the options. From background and header text colors to borders, category names and srollbars. Nearly every visual aspect can be modified.

The player window itself displays a list of radio stations, the currently playing station, the volume, and pause and stop options. You can switch to another radio station with a click.

The program supports VLC and Windows Media Player plugins, but I was not able to get those to work in the Chrome browser. It is not clear from the description whether they are used to play the radio stations in the browser, or if the music is redirected to the desktop player from where they are then played.

Google Chrome users who like to listen to Internet radio while surfing should take a closer look at Radio Player Live.

When you look at the extensions that you have installed in your Chrome browser, you will probably notice that you do not use all of them all the time. It is more likely that you have extensions installed for specific tasks, for instance work, entertainment, research or shopping. And even though you do not use them all of the time, all of them are running in the background whenever the web browser is open. This seems like a waste of resources, and maybe even space, considering that many extensions like to place icons into Chrome’s address bar.

Context is a useful extension that allows you to group extensions and enable or disable those groups at will. All you need to do to get started after installation is to open the options of the extensions and start adding new contexts (aka groups). You are asked to select a name and icon for the context for identification purposes. The extension displays 14 different icons that you can select for your groups.

Once created, you can start dragging and dropping extension into those groups. Context by default will only display extensions in the options that you can move into groups. You can enable apps support under additional options to group applications as well.

Click the Save button once you are done. You can from that moment on click on the Context menu button to select one of the extension groups that you want to work with. Switching between groups, or enabling all extensions, works without a restart of the browser. Keep in mind though that extensions that you have not added to any groups are not available when you activate individual groups. They become only available if you enable the all extensions option. Only the extensions and apps that you have added to that particular group are then enabled in the browser, with everything else disabled.

Context will display a notification at the bottom whenever you install a new app or extension. You can use it to move the program into one of the available groups.

The core benefits should be obvious. You first save browser resources by reducing the number of extensions that are running in the background. You second save screen estate and increase the visibility by removing extension icons from the address bar that you do not need to work with right now.

Google Chrome users can download the useful extension from the official Chrome Web Store.

You may sometimes be in a position where you need to look up information but do not have Internet available at the moment. This can be during your daily commute or in a situation where an Internet connection is not available or working. We have reviewed several options in the past to get the majority of Wikipedia contents on your system locally to access the information without the need for an Internet connection. Check out WikiTaxi, OkaWix or Wikipedia School DVDs if you are interested in those methods.

The latest option has been exclusively designed for the Google Chrome web browser and therefor also Google’s Chromebook. The web application allows you to download nearly all textual contents from Wikipedia to make them available directly in the Chrome browser.

You are asked to either pick a 13 Megabyte dump of the most popular Wikipedia articles or the big database which weights in at about 1 Gigabyte. You can also select one of four available parsers which turn the Wikipedia information into HTML contents that are readable in the web browser.

Especially the large download make take a while, and you also need to make sure that you have enough disk space available for it.

Once installed you can use the following page to access your Wikipedia information offline in the Chrome browser. The developer suggests to bookmark the page for fast access.

It offers a search option, access to the program settings, access to the article index and an option to load a random article from the repository.

The search supports suggestions which are displayed automatically once you start typing in the first letter of your search term.

The articles are complete with the exception of media and the footnotes which are not displayed at all.

Search results are displayed almost instantly on modern computer systems.

Chrome users who would like their own personal Wikipedia copy on their computer can download and install the web app from the official Chrome web store. (via Chromestory)

Making sure that you are connected via SSL is one of the most important things Internet users can do to improve their security online. This is especially true on public computer networks, like those on airports, Internet cafes or on campus. Why? Because it is otherwise dead easy to wiretap the traffic that you send and receive on the network. And while that may not be an issue for some activities online, you better be sure when you sign into accounts or handle financial transactions on sites such as PayPal or your bank’s online presence.

KB SSL Enforcer is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to enforce SSL encryption on websites and services that support it. If it detects that a site is offering both http and https connections, it will automatically connect the user to the more secure https connection to improve online security.

The extension handles the detection and switching to SSL automatically. The concept is very similar to HTTPS Everywhere for the Firefox web browser, with the difference that HTTPS Everywhere only enforces SSL on sites in its database (with options to create your own rule sets).

The extension maintains a list of sites supporting SSL that you have accessed in the cache to speed up future connections.

You may however come upon sites sometimes that do not work properly when connecting to them via https. A blacklist is provided that will block the automatic redirection to https for listed sites. Open the settings of SSL Enforcer by loading the following url in the web browser (chrome://settings/extensions) and clicking on the Options link next to the extension.

The extension handles domains with and without www differently. You can change that in the options so that rules defined for a site apply to both versions.

You can also add sites to a whitelist, which you may need to do if the automatic detection does not discover if a domain supports SSL connections.

Google Chrome users can download SSL Enforcer from the official Chrome web store.

You don’t always have the time to sit in front of your laptop or desktop computer and read lengthy material. Google Chrome, which is a fantastic browser in so many ways, brings yet another extension to the Google Chrome features. This extension is called dotEPUB and it enables you to take the text from a website and generate an eBook in the file format .epub. This means that you can simply click an icon and get a named download in the form of readable text by using this extension. This can then be read on your desktop computer or mobile devices when it is more convenient. With this extension, there is no need to bookmark the page and try to find it again later. The URL is included in the file if you need to find the original source again in the future.

Install the dotEPUB Chrome Extension and it will instantly manifest as an icon that looks like a green traffic light in the upper right pane of your Google Chrome browser window.

Here it was highlighted in yellow, but it is difficult to miss an added Chrome extension. When you are on a web page that has an interesting article or you have found a lengthy Wikipedia article, all you have to do is click this green dot icon and the entire webpage is converted into an e-book format that can be saved, converted and read at will. You can read it on your desktop or laptop or your iPhone or Android. It doesn’t matter what device you use, especially if you use a good conversion tool, which will be discussed shortly.

As many of you are familiar with, Google Chrome downloads files and then creates a tab for the recent downloads in the bottom pane of the screen. When you use dotEPUB, you will see that the text of the page you selected has been downloaded in the form of an .epub file. It is best to open the file location and move these files to a specific folder. Otherwise, you will be sorting through downloads later to find the file.

The new EPUB file will not be instantly readable unless you have software capable of reading .epub files and it is set as a default for such files. You need to have software that can read .epub files. Notebook will not do it, nor will any other text editor, unless you are in the mood to decrypt it. Here is a suggestion:

Try using Stanza, an excellent utility for not only reading .epub files, but also for converting them into formats that most devices can use. Normally, dotEPUB is available to move directly to several different mobile devices, but not the Amazon Kindle. Stanza allows you to read your saved text from dotEPUB and also export it in various formats, such as Kindle compatible formats.

Download Stanza for Windows and you will have the perfect freeware that will enable you to actually read the content you copied and saved. Use the File tab to convert to readable formats for eReader, HTML 4x, Amazon Kindle, etc. You can use Stanza as a reading tool on your desktop for all of the website texts you have saved using dotEPUB.

Though you don’t get the pictures with the text, you can still have the text. In a matter of five minutes, you can save extensive information from websites and save them for reading offline. The possibilities are numerous with this Google Chrome extension. Enjoy the information.

Many Google Chrome extensions add a button to the browser’s address toolbar. If you have installed more than a dozen or so extensions, you may notice that space can become a issue, especially if the majority of extensions has added a button to the address bar. While you can hide individual extension icons with a right-click and the selection of Hide Button from the menu, it is usually not something that you may want to do considering that you may use buttons eventually again.

You could also disable and enable extensions to hide and show their buttons, but that is also not overly comfortable.

The Google Chrome Extensions Manager provides a solution for this problem. It basically adds two-click options to the browser to manage extensions, apps and themes comfortable.

A click on the extension’s button displays all installed extensions, applications and themes. Each entry is listed with its name, version and description plus buttons to open the homepage, uninstall or open the options page. The checkbox finally is used to quickly enable or disable the extension, theme or app in the browser. Links at the top lead to specific sections, for instance to display all disabled or outdated add-ons, or to display all extensions, apps and themes regardless of their status in one list.

The core feature that the Extensions Manager provides is the ability to quickly enable or disable extensions, applications or themes in the browser. It takes two clicks, one on the extension icon and the second in the checkbox to enable or disable select extensions.

That’s more comfortable than using Chrome’s built-in extension manager or the right-click context menu to do the same (at least for re-enabling them after disabling).

Themes can also be switched with two clicks once the Chrome Extensions Manager add-on has been installed.

The extension furthermore allows you to keep track of updates which are displayed in the recent tab, and of outdated extensions which are displayed in the outdated tab.

The options of Extensions Manager offer additional customizations. Here it is for instance possible to start the display in a specific view mode, change the types of entries that appear under recent, or disable notifications when extensions are enabled or disabled.

Especially users with lots of installed themes, extensions or apps in the Chrome browser can benefit from Extensions Manager as it makes it easier to deal with installed browser add-ons.

Chrome users can download the extension from the official Chrome Web Store.

Many football fans use the Internet regularly to check for football scores, results, tables, fixtures and news. While it is easy to open the homepage of your favorite football club to read up on the latest news, you could also visit sport news portals like BBC Sport that cover all big European leagues and competitions.

Ultimate Football Results is an extension for the Google Chrome browser that brings football news to the web browser. The extension adds a single icon to the address bar of the browser upon installation. A click on that icon opens an overlay window with four information panels.

Each panel or frame can be configured individually to display the table, results or fixtures of a specific league or tournament. The extension supports all major and minor European leagues, from the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga to the Italian Series A, the Spanish Liga and the UEFA champions league and Europa League. It is all there.

Each frame can be configured individually to display table, results or fixtures for a specified league or tournament. Even better, a total of four tabs, each with four frames, can be configured in the options.

Football fans only interested in one league could for instance display all three in three different frames in the Home tab, add four European leagues under Europe, League One or Two in the Other tab and finally the FA cup, Champions League and European League under Knockout Cups.

First time users can configure the extension with a right-click on the icon and the selection of options. Here it is then possible to select a league or tournament and the type of news that should be displayed in the selected frame.

Some information that are presented in a frame can be clicked on. Game results for instance lead to game stats that list the goal scorers, bookings, match stats and links to text commentary of the game, the team list and the next result (that is the next game that has been played in that particular league or cup).

Ultimate Football Results is currently not including national teams, the World cup, Euro cup or any other cup that is played in the world with national teams. The extension lacks women football, non European leagues and lower divisions with the exception of League One and League Two. Adding those would certainly improve the extension further.

It sometimes takes a few seconds before the window is rendered and the results displayed. This can be a issue as there is no indication that news are loaded.

Google Chrome users can download and install Ultimate Football Results from the official Chrome Web Store.

Firefox users can try Footiefox which offers more leagues and countries, live notifications but less detailed information about each game.

Prerendering in the best case speeds up specific processes. When it comes to web browsers the technology could pre-load and render websites to display them faster for the user. This only works if the browser gets the site right. If you look at a standard web search for instance, you will get ten search results by default plus other pages that you could click on. It would be a tremendous waste of processing power and bandwidth if the browser would load all of those pages, especially if the user would only click on one page of the results.

The Google Chrome web browser, and Chromium as well, use prerendering in a limited way. It may be used when you enter a phrase into the Chrome address bar. But which page or pages do get prerendered when this is happening?

That’s easy to find out (thanks to François Beaufort who posted a short demonstration video on YouTube). All you need to do is to open the Google Chrome or Chromium Task Manager to see which pages get prerendered by the web browser.

You can open the Chrome Task Manager with a click on the Wrench icon, the selection of Tools and Task Manager. You can alternatively use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Esc to bring up the Task Manager directly.

Look for Prerender: entries in the Task Manager. The indicator is followed either by the site url that got prerendered or the page title. It may still take time to identify the prerendered link on the page as Google is not displaying the information in the web browser.

Prerendering in the web browser is automatically enabled. Users who do not want to use the feature can disable it the following way. Enter chrome://flags in the address bar and locate the “Prerender from omnibox” option.

Enables prerendering of suggestions from the Omnibox and predicts appropriate network actions (prerendering, Instant, DNS preconnect) by calculating a confidence value for each Omnibox result.

Switch to disabled in the pulldown menu to turn the feature off.

When you look at Google Chrome’s feature set and compare it to that of other browsers like Opera, Internet Explorer or Firefox, you will come to the conclusion that web browsers are more alike than they are different. Two items that will definitely be on the list are the built-in PDF viewer and the native Adobe Flash plugin. (Firefox may get a native pdf viewer in future versions)

Google Chrome users can open pdf documents directly in the browser. While the viewer is not comparable in functionality to desktop pdf readers, it is certainly enough to read a document online.

And native support for Adobe’s Flash technology ensures that Chrome users are automatically updated to the newest version whenever it is released, which improves overall security significantly.

Some Chrome users on the other hand may not want to use the native plugins of the Chrome browser. This can be the case if they have noticed that the Flash plugin is acting up or if they have installed a feature rich pdf reader on their system that they prefer to use.

Chrome, even with another Flash or PDF reader plugin installed, continues to use its native plugins for Flash and PDF contents (see Why are Two Flash Player Plugins Running In Google Chrome? for instance for an explanation).

Users of the Chrome web browser need to disable the native plugins before they can use third party plugins or software instead. This is done by entering chrome://plugins/ in the Chrome address bar and hitting enter.

The page that opens displays a list of all plug-ins currently installed in the Chrome browser. Relevant for this guide are the Flash and Chrome PDF Viewer plugins. A click on Disable below the Chrome PDF Viewer disables those capabilities in the browser.

In regard to Flash, it is a bit more complicated. It is necessary to click on Details first to display all installed Flash plugins in Chrome. Locate the Flash plugin that has its location in the Chrome application folder and click the disable link to disable it. Make sure another Flash plugin is still active if you want to use the technology on the Internet.

That’s how you disable both the native Flash plugin and the native pdf viewer in Google Chrome.

Are you using Google Chrome’s native plugins? Or did you notice issues using those plugins?