Firefox/Chrome: The Lightning Reveal extension for Google Chrome reveals what lies behind Amazon's Lightning Deals before they're live on Amazon.

Who doesn't love pop-ups? Really, I mean, it has to be the world's most effective and well-respected mode of advertising. You're browsing along, reading something on the Web, and suddenly your screen explodes with color and NSFW video clips. Seriously, how can you not enjoy that?

If you're one of the odd few who aren't enthusiastic about pop-ups, you might appreciate Better Pop Up Blocker. While Chrome already features some pop-up blocking measures, they're not very serious. Even when you add the popular AdBlock extension, Chrome's blocking abilities still leave something to be desired. This point is made quite convincingly by the Better Pop Up Blocker homepage. If you're using Chrome, just click the image that says Click me, I'm an image, and see what I mean.

By default, Chrome allowed three different huge pop-up windows to appear. After installing Better Pop Up Blocker, no pop-up appeared when clicking the image. I was still able to see what pop-ups were blocked using the extension's menu and open them if I did want to access them. The browser action icon will every time it blocks a pop-up, just to let you know it's working.

All in all, it's a welcome addition to my Chrome installation - and one that will remain installed on my system.

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 access to the sites I need. Ctrl+Space and then d can take me to Download Squad. I like it. It's very customizable. You can create and delete groups, move sites from group to group, etc. The hotkey assignment GUI is well thought-out. You can see at a glance what hotkeys are already used.

Cons: It doesn't always work. Sometimes I hit Ctrl+Space and nothing happens. That's mainly when the address bar ("Omnibar") is in focus, and I suspect it's due to Chrome's limitations. Still, it's annoying. It's one of those add-ons that takes some getting used to, but once you're addicted, you want to use it all the time. Having it work intermittently just keeps the habit from forming.

Okay, that was just one con -- but it's a big one!

Bottom line: Awesome add-on, if only it worked all the time.

Google Chrome extensions can be truly handy, but there's at least one feature power users have been clamoring for since the beginning: the ability to hide an extension's browser action button. Good news, Chrome Geeks: the Canary build now lets you hide extension buttons.

Just right-click the icon you want to disappear and select hide button, and it's gone. If you should happen to get removal remorse, just head to chrome://extensions and you'll find a show button link next to any extension you've previously hidden.

Yes, you could already drag-to-resize the entire browser actions area to hide any buttons which happened to be on the right-hand side -- but now you've got full control over which extensions get space on your toolbar and which don't.

At last, extensions which you can call from the context menu or invoke with a hotkey don't have to chew up valuable toolbar real estate in Google Chrome.

Continue reading Google Chrome adds option to hide any extension's button

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. The imgur.com link is the result of a successful upload attempt. I dragged an image onto a text area, and drag2up uploaded it to imgur.com in the background, and then it populated the text area with the URL of the image. It even wrapped it in forum-friendly [img] tags for me.

The second line (the one starting with Error) is what happened when I tried uploading a ZIP file. No joy, but I guess that might be resolved in time.

When I tried using drag2up with another edit control (CKEditor running in a heavily-customized environment), it couldn't even modify the text shown in the control. But it did work with a simple text area control.

Bottom line: It's really, really cool, when it works. Let's hope it'll gradually start working with more and more files and editors.

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 functionality to Google Chrome, along with a nice extra feature: instant notifications.

Whenever one of the feeds you've subscribed to updates, you get a nice sound effect (a human voice going "Boing!"), the icon shakes, and an unread count appears. When you then click the icon, you can see a list of the unread items in each feed, and hover over them to see a preview. Naturally, clicking an item opens it in a new tab.

This is a powerful add-on; it has a very rich configuration interface, with no less than 20 different options (I counted!). You can also configure the color scheme, select one of several different notification sounds, and customize it in a myriad other ways. Slick!

We've featured a few Chrome extensions for Google services before, but today Google released three official extensions. With them, you can view your Google Calendar, clip web pages to Google Docs, and view your YouTube feed right from Chrome's navigation bar. More »

There are many, many extensions currently available for Google Chrome in the Chrome Extension Gallery -- over 8,000 in fact -- from both third-party developers and from Google themselves. Yesterday, Google announced the addition of official Chrome extensions for Google Calendar, Docs, and YouTube.

The Google Calendar extension adds quick access to your upcoming events and lets you add new events directly from websites like Facebook. A green plus sign will pop up indicating that it's found an event, allowing you to quickly insert it into your Calendar with location information if it's detected.

Google Docs gets a Web Clipboard extension that allows you to copy and paste text and images to and from the Google Docs online clipboard, for use across multiple browser windows. Handy if you're a heavy Docs user, as Matthew mentioned in his previous coverage.

Last but not least, Google's got a YouTube Feed extension that keeps an eye on your favorite videos and notifies you when new videos are available in your YouTube homepage feed. It also brings the social elements of ratings, likes and uploads from your friends to Chrome with direct access straight from the extension. Great for avid YouTube users.

These official Chrome extensions and many more are available, of course, from the Chrome Extensions Gallery.

Filed under: Features, Browsers, Lists

It’s on eBay now.

Go buy it and take pictures of somethin’!

I am not sure about you, but every time I came across a great tutorial on the Web, I will convert the content to a pdf file and keep it for future reference. Some of you might be pondering why I am wasting my time converting it to pdf since I can just bookmark the site. There are several reasons for this: firstly, I am not always connected to the Web, so if I need the information immediately, I won’t be able to access it. Secondly, there is no guarantee that the site will forever be there for me. It could be available today and disappear the next day (we’ve seen too much of this, don’t we?)

If you are like me, and are also using Google Chrome, you are in luck, here are several PDF extensions that you can use to make the whole conversion process much easier and faster.

1. Save As PDF

This is my favorite extension for pdf conversion. In my experience with several other extensions, this is the best, in terms of the speed and quality of conversion.

After installing the extension, you will see an icon at the toolbar. When you come across any webpage that you want to convert to pdf, simply click on the button and it will start the conversion immediately. The conversion is fast (typically less than 5 seconds) and it runs in the background without disrupting you from your work.

Save As PDF also comes with plenty of configuration options (in fact, it is the only pdf extension that comes with configuration option). Things you can configure including the page size, page format, page margin and whether it should convert javascript, images and background. The best of all, it allows you to set a password for your converted pdf file.

2. PDFmyURL

Instead of an icon in the toolbar, the PDFmyURL icon appears in the URL bar. Similarly, on a page that you want to be converted to pdf, just click on the icon and it will do all the work in the background.

The speed of conversion is rather fast, but it is not able to convert images properly for sites that are using lazy loading. In addition, it seems to add an extra margin to the four sides of the page, which make the file size bigger.

3. Web2PDFConverter

Web2PDFConverter is yet another pdf converter extension for Google Chrome. One of its unique feature is the ability to view your converted PDF files in Google Docs. You can then choose to save the pdf file in your Google Docs and free up storage space on your computer.

One annoyance with Web2PDF is that during conversion, it takes control of the browser and prevents you from doing any other things. You won’t be able to switch to other tabs, or even other applications. Doing so will terminate the conversion process. In term of user-friendliness, this is definitely the worst in my opinion.

Wrapping up

If you are looking for a pdf conversion tool for your Google Chrome, I would strongly recommend SaveAsPdf. What other tools do you use to convert your stuff to PDF?

With so many new extensions uploaded in the gallery every day, we know it can be tricky to decide which ones to try out. We post a selection of the ones we enjoy in the "Featured" section of the gallery, and from now on we plan to update you regularly on new additions to our recommended extensions.

Here are a few new extensions in the Featured section:

Layers allows you to overlay content like sticky notes, images, videos, tweets and even maps over any web site. You can drag and drop your content anywhere on the page. You can also share and discuss whatever you add to the site with your friends across social networks.

The Postrank extension for Google Reader helps you stay up-to-date on the news and posts that matter. The extension aggregates engagement activity such as tweets, comments and votes from over two dozen social networks and ranks stories based on how much engagement each story has received.

With the Ozone extension, you can get suggestions from fifteen different sources like Google, Amazon, your bookmarks, Gmail, YouTube and more. As you type in the Ozone search box, you can see the suggestions change in real time.

Highlight to Search is a new official Google extension that allows you to search keywords by highlighting instead of typing them into a search box. When you highlight words within a web page, you'll see a magnifying glass icon appear below the highlighted keywords. Clicking on the icon or the keywords allows you to search easily from the search box that immediately appears.

These are just a few of the new featured Chrome extensions, and you can find many more in the gallery.

LastPass is easy, secure, and works across systems and browsers—it's our