Chrome: Text This To Me is a Chrome add-on that allows you to quickly send yourself SMS messages from your browser with links, notes, and other snippets of text with a single click. Whether you just want to send yourself a URL to open on your phone's browser, or you want to remind yourself to pick up the milk on the way home, Text This To Me gives you a quick way to do it without installing anything on your device. More »

Chrome: If you're a designer or just curious to see what fonts are used on your favorite web sites, the free Chrome extension ‘What's the font?' reveals this information easily. After installing the extension you just need to right-click the highlighted text with the font you want to identify and choose the menu option for ‘What's the font?'. More »

Chrome: Most feed readers default to a long list of headlines and articles with a folder-like navigation tree on the left to help you sift through your feeds and unread posts. It works, but FeedSquares is a Chrome extension that connects to Google Reader and uses tiles to display your feeds instead. Highlighted and off-axis tiles indicate new topics, and you can click any tile to see the posts for that feed, and any article to bring up the full text. More »

Chrome: Bookolio customizes the new tab page to make it more useful. The extension gives you instant access to all your bookmarks and sites you visit the most, as well as quick switching between all types of search engines. More »

Chrome: We've discussed the 20-20-20 Rule before, where every 20 minutes you take a 20 second break and look at an object 20 feet away to relieve eyestrain and rest your eyes. The 20 Cubed add-on for Chrome will automatically remind you to take those breaks so you don't have to set your own timer. More »

2011 was a big year for Google Chrome and all of its users. There are more Chrome users out there than ever before, and tons of great Chrome extensions to add functionality, privacy, and other services to your browser. Here are the most popular Google Chrome-related posts, extensions, and add-ons at Lifehacker during 2011. More »

Chrome: fPrivacy is a new Chrome add-on that gives you granular control over the permissions that Facebook apps request when you add them to or authorize them to access your account. For example, if you add a Facebook app and you're not too comfortable with the app's ability to post to your wall, or access your data at any time, you can deny those specific permissions while granting the other ones required for the app to function. More »

Have you ever wondered what advertising sites track your web browsing? Sheepish is an extension for Chrome that shows you exactly which companies are keeping an eye on you for every site you visit and blocks them from doing so.More »

Chrome is overtaking Firefox among power users, and for good reason. It's an incredibly powerful, extensible web browser with tons of excellent features. Today, we're covering it all—from longtime shortcuts to the latest features in one of our favorite web browsers. More »

Chrome: Sometimes you don't want to deal with bookmarking an article or site for later viewing and you just want a simple nudge to look at it again later. Page Snooze does just that, letting you "snooze" a tab for up to two weeks.More »

Chrome: Now that more of you are using Chrome than ever before, it's also likely you're using more Chrome extensions than ever before. Disable All Extensions, as the name implies, gives you one button to enable or disable all of your Chrome extensions quickly without restarting the browser, or select individual ones to toggle or uninstall whenever you choose. More »

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.

Firefox/Chrome/Safari: News aggregation service News360's (@news360app) new browser extension, Periscope, offers up likeminded stories related to the news articles you're reading to the top of your screen.More »

Articles on the web can get a little long sometimes, and it can be difficult to skim them and find the parts that are most relevant to you. That's where Scrollbar of Contents comes in. It's a free add-on for Chrome that adds clickable buttons next to your scrollbar so you can jump right to different sections of the article you're reading. More »

Interested in making your Chrome Extension (or packaged app) talk using synthesized speech? Chrome now includes a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API that’s simple to use, powerful, and flexible for users.

Let’s start with the "simple to use" part. A few clever apps and extensions figured out how to talk before this API was available – typically by sending text to a remote server that returns an MP3 file that can be played using HTML5 audio. With the new API, you just need to add "tts" to your permissions and then write:

chrome.tts.speak('Hello, world!');

It’s also very easy to change the rate, pitch, and volume. Here’s an example that speaks more slowly:

chrome.tts.speak('Can you understand me now?', {rate: 0.6});

How about powerful? To get even fancier and synchronize speech with your application, you can register to receive callbacks when the speech starts and finishes. When a TTS engine supports it, you can get callbacks for individual words too. You can also get a list of possible voices and ask for a particular voice – more on this below. All the details can be found in the TTS API docs, and we provide complete example code on the samples page.

In fact, the API is powerful enough that ChromeVox, the Chrome OS screen reader for visually impaired users, is built using this API.

Here are three examples you can try now:

    TTS Demo (app)
    Talking Alarm Clock (extension)
    SpeakIt (extension)

Finally, let's talk about flexibility for users. One of the most important things we wanted to do with this API was to make sure that users have a great selection of voices to choose from. So we've opened that up to developers, too.

The TTS Engine API enables you to implement a speech engine as an extension for Chrome. Essentially, you provide some information about your voice in the extension manifest and then register a JavaScript function that gets called when the client calls chrome.tts.speak. Your extension then takes care of synthesizing and outputting the speech – using any web technology you like, including HTML5 Audio, the new Web Audio API, or Native Client.

Here are two voices implemented using the TTS Engine API that you can install now:

    Lois TTS - US English
    Flite SLT Female TTS - US English

These voices both use Native Client to synthesize speech. The experience is very easy for end users: just click and install one of those voices, and immediately any talking app or extension has the ability to speak using that voice.

If a user doesn't have any voices installed, Chrome automatically speaks using the native speech capabilities of your Windows or Mac operating system, if possible. Chrome OS comes with a built-in speech engine, too. For now, there's unfortunately no default voice support on Linux – but TTS is fully supported once users first install a voice from the Chrome Web Store.

Now it's your turn: add speech capability to your app or extension today! We can't wait to hear what you come up with, and if you talk about it, please add the hashtag #chrometts so we can join the conversation. If you have any feedback, direct it to the Chromium-extensions group.

Chrome: Over the weekend, Google unveiled Chrome Remote Desktop, a new Chrome extension that allows you to remotely control and manage another Mac, Windows, or Linux system through Google Chrome, as long as you have the extension installed on both systems. More »

Chrome: When we looked at some of your favorite Facebook customizers, many of you noted that all you really wanted was for Facebook to restore your news feed to its proper form. Facebook Classic is a Chrome plug-in that does just that. More »

Are you already a happy user of Chrome Developer Tools but always wanted that particular feature added to make you even more productive? Then we have some exciting news for you: our developer tools are now extensible!

You can now add new panels and sidebar section panes, retrieve network requests data, evaluate scripts on the page being inspected, and add custom audit rules.

The extension support is still experimental, but we wanted to let you know early, so we can incorporate your feedback before releasing the APIs.

Here’s how to get started with writing extensions for Chrome Developer Tools:

• Use the dev channel of Chrome as the APIs are still under development;
• Enable experimental extension APIs using the chrome://flags page;
• List experimental in the permissions list of your extension;
• Add a devtools_page field to your extension’s manifest, e.g:

The developer tools extension pages get access to the chrome.experimental.devtools.* APIs which are described further in our docs. Be sure to check out the sample extensions, which include extensions for jQuery and FirePHP users and a simple audit extension that finds broken links.

For a richer example, you can also check out Page Speed for Chromium, which uses the extensions API to provide Page Speed suggestions right in the Chrome Devtools UI.

iOS/Android/Firefox/Chrome/Safari: Previously mentioned social feed reader