Chrome: Keeping up with the stream of news throughout the day can be difficult. If you're looking for a way to stay updated without heading over to Google News repeatedly, GNews is a Chrome extension that allows you to quickly glance at hot topics and move on with your day.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: 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 »

A new Google-funded study of browser security by security research firm Accuvant Labs crowned Chrome the champion of security features, and ranked Firefox below Internet Explorer in terms of protection available from web-borne threats. Predictably, Microsoft and Mozilla have different opinions on what makes a browser secure, and why Accuvant's findings are off base. All of this got us thinking about which browser is the most secure, and whether the security features listed in studies like this even matter to the rest of us. 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 »

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 »

Previously available only to Chrome and Safari users, Kindle Cloud Reader now works on Firefox, so you can read your Kindle books from within Mozilla's browser online or offline.

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 »

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

Firefox/Chrome/Safari: Previously mentioned to-do manager and browser extension Taskforce has rolled out a number of new updates to its service, including the ability to share and collaborate on lists with other users, add recurring tasks, and fully integrate with Google Tasks, so you can manage your to-dos even when you're using a computer or device where Taskforce is unavailable. More »

Google's brought some good news for those of us who've been tolerating Chrome in Mac OS X Lion: they've released an update for proper compatibility. It's not that Chrome didn't work before, but it didn't fully support the new UI and—more importantly—wasn't terribly stable. This latest release promises to fix those things while also adding support for C and C++ code, seeking to blur the lines between web and native desktop applications. All good things for Mac users, we think. More »

Web/Chrome/Android/iOS: Springpad is a free service that allows you to save places, notes, itemsand more to your account for future reference. The service just got a lot more social with today's update: now you can connect Springpad to your Facebook account to automatically show you items that your friends like, places they visit, and more in case you want to save them to your account. 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 »

Amazon's new Kindle Cloud Reader webapp allows you to read ebooks you've purchased via the Kindle store on any device without installing an app to do it, regardless of whether you have an active internet connection. More »

Chrome: Google's Instant Pages feature, previously available to Chrome beta users, is now available in the latest stable version of Chrome to load Google search results much faster. You can see the side-by-side speed comparison in the video above. More »

Parents fret all the time about protecting their kids on Facebook, but many of the products and services I’ve seen that aim to help are intrusive, and inject the parents into the child’s normal, healthy online social life in a way that’s awkward for both.

Q:

I have been warned on the Web that Microsoft Office won’t work on Apple’s new Mac operating system, Lion. Is this true?

A:

In my tests, and also according to Microsoft, Office for the Mac does work in Lion, though some relatively minor features won’t work right. Also, you must be using one of the two latest versions of Office.

In my tests, using the current version, Office 2011, all features I tested worked fine, though of course I wasn’t able to test every one of the thousands of features. I even wrote my entire Lion review in Word 2011 on a Lion-equipped Mac. According to Microsoft, the 2008 version also works, though the 2004 version doesn’t.

However, Microsoft hasn’t updated Office for Mac to take advantage of Lion’s new features. More information on Mac Office compatibility with Lion is here and here.

Q:

Can you point me in the right direction for a purchase of a tablet? I am a home inspector and presently use a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a special Windows software program for my job. I need a tablet with a screen size of 12 inches or more. USB ports would be essential.

With its iPhones and iPads, Apple has led people toward a new way of operating digital devices that relies on direct manipulation of items with finger gestures, not a mouse and scroll bars. App icons are arrayed front and center, not buried deep in a file system or limited to a strip at the bottom of the screen.

For awhile, Google's been using their own goo.gl shortener to compress long links, but as of today they'll be using a different shortener, g.co. However, the goal behind g.co is not to provide another URL shortener for you to create short links. Instead, it's a service that only Google can use to shorten links to their own pages—that way, when you see a g.co link, you know that it's coming from a trusted source and you can click on it. For your own links, you can still use Goo.gl, but just know that when you see a g.co link around the internet, it's coming straight from Google and is safe to click on. [Official Google Blog] More »