Wikipedia Companion is a Google Chrome extension that can be used to search Wikipedia in a small browser window without leaving the active website. That’s ideal for users who usually look up things on Wikipedia while browsing other websites.

The extension places an icon in the Google Chrome address bar which opens the Wikipedia browser on the active page. The cursor is automatically placed in the search form on top. A search will display the contents of the article in the browser window. All links are loaded in that window as well so that it is possible to load multiple articles directly in the window.

Basic controls at the top of the window can be used to go back and forth, clear the browsing history and to open the active Wikipedia page in a new tab in the browser.

The options of the extension can be accessed by right-clicking the icon in the address bar. Here it is possible to configure the primary and secondary languages, browser window width (normal and wide) and if featured articles should be displayed on the start page of the extension.

Wikipedia Companion is a handy extension for Google Chrome users who work with Wikipedia regularly. The extension can be downloaded from the Google Chrome extensions gallery.

Great #googlechrome extension for laptops without a middle button: an icon pops up next to a link, so you can click on it and open the link on a new tab. More »

freakshowtime

Facebook recently switched from “Become a Fan” to “Like” feature which has received mixed reactions from the audience. But if you want to “Like” any webpage quickly from the browser window and without logging in to Facebook, the Facebook Likes Google Chrome extension might help.

The extension solves two purposes. First, you can share any webpage with your Facebook friends right from Google Chrome. There is no need to copy links, titles, images and paste them in the status update text box. Just hit the “Like” button and the story is shared on your Facebook wall.

The second advantage is that the extension also shows recent related activity from other Facebook users. This does not necessarily mean your Facebook friends, but shows the content which other users are sharing on Facebook. This is a nice way to figure out which stories are getting the votes and which topic is getting the buzz right now.

To use the extension, click on the “Thumbs up” button placed just right of the address bar as shown below:

The story will be shared with your Facebook friends and you can also see what your friends are “Liking”. Please note the extension does nothing if you are not logged in to Facebook.

Chrome only: Google Chrome extension Speed Dial updates, adding custom site logos for your speed dials and plenty of other customization settings to make your browser start page loo

Google Chrome: Lots of sites (including, unfortunately, us) have truncated RSS feeds, o

Windows only: Google Chrome extension IE Tab Classic loads up the Internet Explorer rendering engine into a tab, so you can access those IE-only web sites without leaving the comfort of

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, expects netbooks running the upcoming Google Chrome OS to be competitively priced between $300 to $400 dollars. In a YouTube video found by Tech Rader, Schmidt says:

“Those prices are completely determined by the costs of the glass, the costs of the processor and things like that.. but in our case Chrome OS and Android are free so there is no software tax associated with all of this.”

Chrome only: Google Chrome extension RescueTime tracks all the web sites you visit, breaks them down into categories, and then

Within a fairly short time, Google Chrome has managed to make a name for itself. Its impressive performance coupled with Google’s aggressive promotion has allowed it to zoom past Opera and Safari. However, fame always comes with a price to pay.

The increased adaption of Chrome has prompted malware developers to focus their attention on Google Chrome. According to BitDefender, there is already at least one malware, which is specifically targeted at Chrome users.

The trojan in question spreads through unsolicited emails, which lures unsuspecting users by promising better e-mail management features in Chrome. Once a user clicks on the supplied link, he is taken to a look-alike of the official Google Chrome extensions page, which serves an executable file (.exe) that spreads the infection.

It is worth noting that the malware does not directly exploit Google Chrome. Instead, it just uses it as an vehicle for fooling gullible users. The lesson in this case is simple – always pay attention to what you are downloading and from where you are downloading.

One of the most recent builds of the Chromium web browser is drawing some criticism. As you may know, Chromium is the open source browser project that Google’s Chrome web browser is based on. In the Chromium version 5.0.375.3, something new showed up. The address bar was not displaying the normal “http://” in front of addresses. It was reported in the issues at Chromium’s code site as a possible bug.

However, it turns out that this is an intentional move, and it’s started a fairly heated debate there. Some of the people posting there do not want to have the http prefix removed. Some people argue that it’s a feature that everyone will eventually want.

Apparently, if you need to copy and paste the address from the Chromium address bar, it will automatically add the “http” prefix, even though you don’t see it. This will need to happen in order to use copied URLs in other applications.

In my opinion, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem as long as the feature works as they say it will. I sometimes wonder why we even need to type the “www” in the address. It’s a waste of time and I’ll be happy if it goes away for good.

Internet Explorer slowly nears 60% market share mark. This time it went down from 61.58 to 60.65, 0.93 point decrease.

In March, Firefox managed to increase its market share by 0.29 point, moving up from 24.23% to 24.52%.

Google Chrome continues to grow steadily; 0.52 point increase this time, up from 5.61% to 6.13%.

Safari has also increased its market share by 0.2 point, from 4.45% to 4.65%.

Opera’s market share also went up by 0.02 point, from 2.35% to 2.37%.

<!-- videoId: OUl2mJnjwbY --><!-- /videoId: OUl2mJnjwbY -->Chrome: There are apps with helpful keyboard shortcuts, and then there are old-school text editors like vim.

Recently, Microsoft has released the final version of Silverlight 4. Not only this release includes Google Chrome support, but also offers features, such as:

Hardware-accelerated video with multi-codec digital rights management (DRM)
Camera and microphone support
Multicast streaming
Deep zoom support
Multi-touch support with Accelerometer
… and more

Download Silverlight 4.

Google's Gmail team added two nice features to the Webmail application April 15: Drag-and-drop attachments and calendar invites.

Users can now drag-and-drop photos, documents, spreadsheets and other files from their computer to Gmail.

You have to access Gmail Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6 to enjoy all of this AJAX-ey goodness.

I dragged-and-dropped a photo, Word document and PDF in that order in seconds using this tool, which Google had automatically enabled. No Gmail Labs tenure here!

My blue arrows point to how the attachment I'm dragging hovers like a ghost or shadow over the attachment box, which turns green. Here's what the final result looks like:

When we demonstrated Google Chrome OS last Fall, a few folks asked us how it would handle printing. Today we wanted to give developers a little more insight into our approach for printing from Chrome OS and other web-connected platforms.

While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices. Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system-- from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices -- simply isn't feasible.

Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today. Using the one component all major devices and operating systems have in common-- access to the cloud-- today we're introducing some preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that enables any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.

Rather than rely on the local operating system (or drivers) to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.

Google Cloud Print is still under development, but today we are making code and documentation public as part of the open-source Chromium and Chromium OS projects. While we are still in the early days of this project, we want to be as transparent as possible about all aspects of our design and engage the community in identifying the right set of open standards to make cloud-based printing ubiquitous. You can view our design docs and outlines here and we hope you stay tuned for updates in the coming months.

If you’ve dug around the many graphs that are displayed when you type “about:histograms” into Chrome’s Omnibox, you’ll notice that we’re still obsessed about measuring, benchmarking, and improving speed and performance on the browser.

Previously, we published a series of video interviews on several key engineering pieces that go into designing a fast, responsive modern browser, namely DNS pre-resolution, the V8 JavaScript engine, and DOM bindings.

In this next installment of technical interviews on Chrome’s speed, we’ll dive into two more areas that contribute to Chrome’s speed: UI responsiveness and WebKit.

WebKit
with James Robinson

Chrome: Hailing from the camp of lite