Are you tired of items like the Chat and Invite Boxes cluttering up your Gmail account? Then join us as we look at the Better Gmail extension for Google Chrome.

Before

Here are some examples of items that you may be tired of looking at in your Gmail account such as the “Footer” below your “Inbox”, the “Chat Box”, and the “Invitation Box”.

Perhaps you would also like to have the “New Window, Print all, & Create a document Commands” moved elsewhere. And of course there is everyone’s “favorite” sponsored links… Time to do some cleaning up and reorganizing.

Better Gmail in Action

As soon as you have installed Better Gmail a new tab will automatically open and present you with the available options. Place a “checkmark” in the box for each option that you would like activated and click on “Save” when finished.

Note: The final option entry is a tie-in with two other “linked” extensions (Folders4Gmail & HTML Signature) while the middle listing is a link to an article for disabling Google Buzz.

Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome.

Mini Google Maps in Action

While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were:

• Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain)
• Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size)
• The ability to get directions in combination with a map

We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view.

Chrome: If you've got a good stash of bookmarks tucked away in Delicious, you can keep on saving and tagging them, and even synchronize them wit

 Just a short demonstration of a Google Chrome extension called chromeTouch. It enables touchscreen and inertia scrolling in Google Chrome, similar to that of the Grab and Drag extension from Firefox. You can find chromeTouch in the Google Chrome extension gallery
 

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.

Games-Tech-Film-TV-Stuff

Google's Chrome browser has been heavy hit by people claiming it has serious privacy issues.

After an interesting discussion with people who are, “relevant to my interests”, the topic of Google Chrome soon came up. Most predictably what was mentioned was the privacy issues raised with it. As a believer in the open-source vetting process, I heavily disagree that Google could be doing anything subversive to our personal data.

To settle this argument in a non-subjective way I decided the best course of action would be an experiment. Essentially, what I wanted to test was the difference in packets between Google Chrome on first boot-up and search term “test123″ and a comparable browser with similar conditions. This way, we test Chrome against a vetted control browser. A few conditions before we get started:

• Experimental Browser: Google Chrome Beta for Linux (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 x64) with experience reporting disabled.
• Control browser: Midori 0.2.3 (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 x64), a WebKit browser licensed under a similar permissive license as Chrome.
• Analysis Method: A tcpdump, sudo tcpdump -w testbrowser.pcap -s 1550 dst www.google.com, command and Wireshark analysis.
  • This tcpdump commands monitors all traffic going to the Google domain (216.239.32.0 – 216.239.63.255)
  • Wireshark was to make the dump look pretty.
• Procedure: Start the dump, load up the browser and enter a search term to Google for “test123″. Stop the packet dump after this and monitor the results.

What I found:

The results actually surprised me in a very positive way. Not only did the two browsers communicate on exactly the same ports but Chrome also used around 60 less packets in the final dump. A cruel twist of irony that a third-party browser communicates with Google over 100% more than Chrome does. Anyway, without further hesitation, here is the dump from the different conditions.

Are you a racing fan in need of a short (or long) break from work? Then get ready to enjoy a mid-day speed boost with the 3D Rally Racing extension for Google Chrome.

3D Rally Racing in Action

This is the opening screen for 3D Rally Racing. You can start game play, view current best times, and read through the instructions from here.

The first thing that you should do is have a quick look at the instructions to help you get set up and started.

Click on “Play” to start the process. Before you can go further you will need to choose a “User Name”. Once you have done that click “Select Track”…

Tipsters like theworldisasheep saw it, this editor confirmed it, and Google even mentioned it in their blog post, at the very end: the latest release of their Chrome browser often crashes when loading Gmail with Offline enabled. It will likely get fixed in a small new update coming soon, but in the meantime, if you're desperate to get back into Gmail without your browser dying, you can create a temporary bookmark to the no-labs version of Gmail. If you want a more surefire solution, head to your Options, switch to the "Under the Hood" tab, click "Gears Settings," and click the "Remove" link next to Gmail and Google-related items. You may lose your offline data for now, but you'll be able to re-synchronize it when two of Google's best products finish duking it out. [Google Code]

Tipsters like theworldisasheep saw it, this editor confirmed it, and Google even mentioned it in their blog post, at the very end: the latest release of their Chrome browser often crashes when loading Gmail with Offline enabled. It will likely get fixed in a small new update coming soon, but in the meantime, if you're desperate to get back into Gmail without your browser dying, you can create a temporary bookmark to the no-labs version of Gmail head to your Options, switch to the "Under the Hood" tab, click "Gears Settings," and click the "Remove" link next to Gmail and Google-related items. You may lose your offline data for now, but you'll be able to re-synchronize it when two of Google's best products finish duking it out. [Google Code]

Google SearchWiki, we hardly used ye.

Google March 3 said it is replacing its little-used SearchWiki feature with stars, little star-shaped buttons next to search results that users can click to mark favorite Web pages.

SearchWiki, which you can see demoed here in its November 2008 launch, let users add, remove or reorder Web pages, as well edit and compose notes on search results for any query.

It was tedious. When you wanted to manage your favorite results, you had to go to the bottom of the search results page, which people don't tend to do naturally, and click the "Add a result" link at the bottom.

There you could add Web pages to the search results, along with links to show and restore listings you've removed, and changes and comments made by other users.

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.

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<!-- /videoId: HqmUbNGkM9I -->Windows/Mac/Linux: The latest Beta update for Google Chrome does away with the need for clever bookmarklets by automatically dropping down a translation bar when you're browsing another language. It also adds whitelist-type controls over Flash, Java, and other browser content.

The video up top demonstrates Chrome's translation bar in practice. It's worth noting that if you don't want Chrome to offer a translation bar for certain foreign languages (those different from the language you set in the preferences), your best bet is to add that language to your list in Chrome's settings—there doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off entirely.

For those of you who like to put bookmarks on the Bookmarks Bar in Google Chrome but hate that a few bookmarks or any bookmarklet doesn't have a favicon, this tip is for you. Here's how to change the favicon to any bookmark and any bookmarklet in Google Chrome.

For this example, I'll be working with changing the favicon for the Readability bookmarklet.

Note: Make sure Google Chrome is closed.

1. Download SQLite Database Browser [sourceforge.net] and extract it.

2. Open it and go to FileOpen, or click on the open folder icon on the toolbar.

3. Navigate to your Google Chrome application directory:

In Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

In Windows Vista/7
C:\Users\YOUR USER NAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Note: Change "YOUR USER NAME" to your real user name.

4. Open the "History" file

5. Click on "Browse Data," and in the "Table" drop down menu, select "urls."