Just like you can hold down the back button in Safari, Firefox, or Chrome, holding down the Finder's back button in Lion shows you where you've recently been.

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/Safari: If you love the new "pull to refresh" gesture that seems to be sweeping the nation, you can actually add it to your browser with this simple extension. More »

Chrome: If you want to skim through your Facebook news feed without stopping for each YouTube video someone posts, the Facebook Video Player extension will play videos in the upper right-hand corner of your window, allowing you to keep browsing as it plays. More »

Chrome/Firefox: FB Secure is a Chrome extension that gives you precise control over the permissions that a Facebook application or game gets when you connect it with your Facebook account. For example, if you're connecting an app but don't want it to post to your wall, you can deny those permissions while accepting the rest. More »

The browser debate is pretty heated on all platforms, but we love Chrome on the Mac. It's fast, easy to use, has a great developer community, and even handles failure with grace.

Chrome: Stylebot lets you easily adjust the style sheets of nearly any page using a button-based control panel or editing the raw text of the style sheet. Most people will use this for mundane applications such as font changes and hiding ads, but using this powerful extension you can completely reskin sites and share your custom CSS with others using the developer's forum. More »

Chrome: Sick of hearing about Snooki, Charlie Sheen, or anyone named Kardashian? Install the Chrome app ‘Silence of the Celebs' to put any celebrity or political figure on a gag list that will remove posts featuring those names from the top news sites. More »

Chrome: Google recently announced you could reverse image search its database by uploading an image or pointing the engine at an image URL. With the Search By Image extension for Chrome, you can right-click on an image to send it through Google Image Search without copying the URL or uploading the image. More »

It isn't particularly difficult to start a torrent download, but if you're not at your main computer, starting a download and controlling your queue from afar can be a pain. Install one of these browser extensions in Chrome or Firefox to streamline your BitTorrent downloads, letting you monitor your torrents from any computer and start new ones with one click. More »

Q:

I have just been notified that Quicken 2007 for the Mac won’t run on Apple’s new Lion operating system. I don’t wish to use the new Quicken Essentials for Mac program, which has fewer features. What are the alternatives?

A:

There are other full-featured finance programs for the Mac, whose makers say they will work with Lion and can import your data from Quicken. Two better-known ones are iBank and Moneydance. I haven’t reviewed either yet, so I can’t say how they measure up. Another option is to install Windows on your Mac, or buy a cheap Windows PC, and run Quicken for Windows. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, says on its support site that, while the Windows version can import most data from the Mac versions, it cannot import investment history. Intuit says: “You will need to either re-download your investment transactions or manually enter them.”

Q:

How do I put my computer to sleep?

A:

The Stable channel has been updated to 12.0.742.122 for Windows, Mac and Chrome Frame; and 12.0.742.124 for Linux.

The Beta channel has also been updated to 13.0.782.55 for Windows, Mac and Chrome Frame; and 13.0.782.56 for Linux.

These releases contain an updated version of the Adobe Flash Player.

Tablet computers generally do a good job of playing videos and music, and displaying photos and documents. But they have limited capacity to store all these files, so you typically can carry only a fraction of your PC’s data on them.

You can get apps that allow tablets to access files you’ve stored in the cloud on services like Dropbox or SugarSync, but these require an Internet connection and can be slow.

Q:

When Apple’s MobileMe service goes away in June 2012, what happens to the stuff I have stored on iDisk? Will Apple still store my material someplace else remotely on one of its servers that I can access via my laptop? Will I still have some sort of .Mac mail system that I can access when on the road and using a computer other than my own?

A:

Apple says it won’t continue to have the equivalent of the iDisk online storage system, accessible directly from the cloud, after MobileMe gives way to its new iCloud service. It advises iDisk users to copy their online files to their Macs or PCs before next June. However, it says the new service will still support mac.com and me.com email accounts, and they will still be accessible via the Web. It promises details later, but has in the meantime published a document answering common questions about the transition at apple.com/mobileme/transition.html.

Q:

Is there a good program that will allow me to capture a Web video, especially a YouTube video, and convert it into an MP4 format file so I can play it on my Android-based Iconia tablet while offline on an airplane?

A:

Once again, the way to buy music is changing.

For years, the legal digital music world has seemed relatively simple to grasp. There were two basic models: the online stores, where you buy singles or albums and store them on individual computers or devices; and the subscription services, where you pay a monthly fee or listen to ads for access to an online trove of songs.

Q:

I have a small but fast-growing business and am strongly considering going with Macs, but I’m not sure if it’s the cost-effective way to go. What are the pros and cons?

A:

To a great extent, it depends on the size and type of business, but I can give you a few general pros and cons. Macs typically cost more upfront, but can save in maintenance costs because they aren’t susceptible to most malicious software and, in my experience, they crash less often. They tend to be easier to network, and, like Windows PCs, they work with Microsoft Exchange. They run standard productivity software, like Microsoft Office, and can access most online business sites and services. But there are many niche business applications that are written for Windows only. You can overcome this by running Windows on a Mac for the occasional program. But if your business would best operate using software that is only for Windows, you’d likely be better off with a Windows machine.

Q:

RockMelt, the Chromium-based social Web browser has reached a new milestone today. Following its first public beta that was released in early March, RockMelt Beta 2 has started being pushed to the browser's users. The new version brings many new features, alongside the usual bug fixes, performance enhancements, and a new base for the browser -- Chromium 10, which also powers Google Chrome's stable channel releases at the moment. The previous RockMelt beta was based on Chromium 9, and it's nice to see it kept up-to-date.

Perhaps the most intriguing new feature in RockMelt Beta 2 is the new bookmarking system, intuitively called View Later. RockMelt's developers have come to the conclusion that, in a modern browser that offers address auto-complete and makes the most visited sites accessible on the new tab page, people don't use bookmarks anymore -- at least not the way they used to back in the day. These days apparently, bookmarking is mostly about saving interesting pages for future reference. Which is where View Later comes in. You just click on the new clock icon at the far right of the address bar (where Chrome's star icon is), and you've added the page you're viewing to your View Later queue. You can even add individual posts from Facebook or Twitter. Your View Later contents are synced using RockMelt's general sync mechanism.

RockMelt Beta 2 also packs a new Twitter app, which now lets you edit retweets, view direct messages, reply to all, and easily use Twitter search. It uses Twitter's new real-time API, so you get the tweets exactly at the moment they're published.

The Chat bar has been redesigned, making it easier to keep track of multiple conversations, since chats are now docked in the Chat bar along the bottom of the browser, where they even stay visible while you browse the Web. Incoming chat messages will trigger notifications, and the ability to drag individual chat sessions out of the bar and into separate windows is still there.

All in all a solid update, that has started rolling out today and will reach all of the browser's users in a week's time. What remains to be seen is how many people are willing to switch from any of the 'big guys' to RockMelt for its added features.

After originally reporting on the introduction of WebKit2 back in April 2010, it looks like it will finally be rolled out with OS X Lion, in a new version of the Safari Web browser.

WebKit2, rather than being a whole new rendering engine, is a layer around WebKit that adds more stability, security and speed -- not entirely unlike the Google Chrome sandbox, which is also strapped onto a version of WebKit. The most exciting feature of WebKit2 is that it splits the browser UI and the rendered content into separate processes. It's possible that each tab will have its own process, too, like Chrome.

This is the first solid news of a Safari update since the minor revisions of desktop and iOS versions back in November. It also represents a major change for the browser, so we wouldn't be surprised if it is Safari 6, rather than 5, that ships with OS X Lion.

We're also hoping to see some benchmarks from the Lion version of Safari. Split processes is definitely a huge step forward, but its JavaScript performance is the thing that really needs to improve. Presumably WebKit2 isn't the only change that Apple plans to make to a new version of Safari, so here's hoping!

Whether you have multiple users or just want different setups for work and play, multiple browser profiles are handy. Instead of going through the trouble to set them up, though, reader cbstryker recommends just using Chrome and Chromium side-by-side instead.