2011 was a big year for Google Chrome and all of its users. There are more Chrome users out there than ever before, and tons of great Chrome extensions to add functionality, privacy, and other services to your browser. Here are the most popular Google Chrome-related posts, extensions, and add-ons at Lifehacker during 2011. More »

Have you ever wondered what advertising sites track your web browsing? Sheepish is an extension for Chrome that shows you exactly which companies are keeping an eye on you for every site you visit and blocks them from doing so.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: Sometimes you don't want to deal with bookmarking an article or site for later viewing and you just want a simple nudge to look at it again later. Page Snooze does just that, letting you "snooze" a tab for up to two weeks.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 »

I first saw a startup called Apture demonstrated in an off-the-record session at O'Reilly's by-invite-only FOO Camp several years ago. The room was packed and I had to stand on my toes outside the doorway to see Apture's Tristan Harris navigate around the Internet on a projected screen. He was highlighting words with his cursor and making related articles, photos, Wikipedia pages and YouTube videos pop off the surface of the page in a handsome little box with rounded corners. Everyone in the room made ooh and aah noises when they saw it. Wherever you saw a word - you could learn a whole lot more about it with a little swipe of your mouse.

What will the Internet look like in 5 or 10 years? Will it still be a series of linked pages that users browse through, one at a time? Google may be betting that it will be something very different, if the company's latest acquisition is any indication. Apture, the service you can see in action if you highlight any word on this ReadWriteWeb, has been acquired by Google, the two companies announced this morning. An addition to offering media-rich contextual search pop-ups on the pages of publishers who have installed the service, Apture also offers a browser plug-in that adds the same functionality to any page on the web. Much of that same functionality will be baked into Google's browser Chrome very soon.

Apture Highlights Extension Welcome Video from Apture Inc on Vimeo.

I love Apture very much - I want Apture for my iPad, I want it for my phone, I want it to shoot out the end of my finger when I see words printed offline. Unfortunately, the Apture app is going to be shut down by Google in 45 days.

The very good news? The same type of functionality is going to be baked into Google Chrome in the near future. Look out, other browsers, Chrome and its users are about to get a whole lot smarter.

Google emphasized that the literal product itself is not going to be placed directly into Chrome, but said that Apture was being shut down so the team could focus on building "more things like it" as a part of Chrome.

Apture says its scripts get served up on 1 billion pages every month right now. "I'm going to miss it [the product] myself, too Marshall," CEO Harris consoled me today, "but hopefully this kind of thing will be showing up all over the place."

The Next Layer of Search

Will people use functionality like this as part of their browser? Will people think to "highlight to Google?" When I first wrote about Apture's browser plug-in, I said it was like Augmented Reality for the Web. But I wondered if people would use it regularly. "If I told you the world was your oyster, that layers of multimedia explanation and context lay behind every word on the web and are now accessible with a simple flick of the wrist - could you develop a new habit of lifting the covers to look at it?"

Other companies that track copy-and-paste activity say that highlighting things on a page so they can be shared by email is still far, far more common than clicking buttons to links via Twitter or Facebook. I imagine that once those copy-and-pasters learn they can highlight to Google, it could really change the search experience.

Harris:

"I can't comment too much about Google's future plans but what I'm excited about is: in 10 years are we still going to be browsing the web we do today? Is search still going to be 10 blue links? Are we going to still click on links to visit another page? I think those things are going to change and Apture represents just one part of those changes. Infinite background information and videos can compliment your understanding of anything you're looking at.

 

"When you think about Google's mission of making the world's information organized and accessible, you can't think about that without thinking about the browser. Google.com is v 1.0 of that, and Chrome's performance and speed has done amazingly well, but the browser is still a flat web browser. I think what you're going to see is more moving beyond the traditional metaphors of a traditional web browser. What's beyond everything we've seen with a browser so far? I hope it's beyond the single page and browsing metaphor that started in 1995. I think we'll see a lot more from the browser itself."

Apture now changes from an option add-on to, in spirit at least if the same software itself does not literally live on, a new way to Google for things. Not on Google.com, not in the search bar, not by voice, not by mobile - but directly from the fabric of the web. That's a big responsibility for a little four year-old company that raised just over $4 million in venture capital.

A Win for Human Intelligence

It's also a hopeful turn of events for those who read with curiosity. I love finding peoples' names online, highlighting them and having their Twitter handles appear. I love highlighting the names of companies and instantly watching product demos in an inline YouTube player. The service's Wikipedia integration means you can read words on the web not just with your own understanding, but with the world's largest, most refined, collective encyclopedia always at your fingertips.

When I asked about integration of this kind of functionality into the developer-facing parts of Chrome, Harris said he thought that was a good idea but couldn't comment.

"When you have native access to search in a browser," he said, "I'm really excited to think about other things Google that could do to enhance other kinds of products."

I am too.

Regardless of how you feel about Facebook's recent changes to its layout, there are plenty of tools that can help you take control of your experience without sacrificing your ability to keep in touch with friends and family.

Firefox 7 is set to be released today, and with a big focus on performance, we thought it time for another round of browser speed test. We pitted the four most popular Windows browsers against each other in a battle of startup times, tab-loading times, JavaScript powers, and memory usage, with some surprising results. More »

Firefox/Chrome/IE: Swidget is a browser add-on that swaps banner and box ads for useful widgets, like the weather, news headlines, or even your Facebook feed. More »

Firefox/Chrome/Opera: Interfacelift is one of our favorite sites for high-resolution wallpapers, but the added clicking required to get to the right size is a pain. InterfaceLift Resolutions Links is a userscript that adds direct links to each resolution right on the download page. More »

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You can trick Chrome into thinking that any super-long URL is a much shorter one by adding it to the list of "other search engines" in the browser's Preferences pane. One great use for this is to get to frequently-used Google Docs files, like in the image above. More »

Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android: Mozilla has released Firefox 5, the first update for its new rapid-release three-month development cycle.

If your browser's default start page is feeling a little ugly and boring, DeviantART user flatmo1 has created a great-looking start page inspired by Windows 8's tiled interface, ready to get you to your favorite sites with just a click. More »

Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Mailplane: Rapportive, a plugin which we've previously mentioned for its Gmail-enhancing powers, has recently added Twitter capabilities. So now you can follow, reply to, and retweet your contacts—all without leaving Gmail. More »

Google Chrome's stable release has now reached version 12, bringing hardware acceleration for 3D CSS, better in-browser privacy for the built-in Adobe Flash Player, and safer downloads. Chrome 12 will automatically scan downloads to check for malicious files, warning users when they're found. With the new updates comes a loss, though, as Gears is now officially kaput—which means no more offline Gmail access for Chrome users. The update will automatically take place over the next couple of days. [Download Google Chrome via Google Chrome Blog]More »

Google released a new version of its Web browser Google Chrome to its stable channel today, the main channel favored by many, if not most, of Chrome's 160 million users. The updated version offers improvements in security and stability, says Google, most of which will function behind-the-scenes for a better browsing experience.

However, improvements to the browser's graphics capabilities will be more noticeable to users. With added support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, Web applications using 3D effects will be "snazzier," Google says. So, what does that mean?

3D CSS

With 3D CSS, which is now available in Google Chrome, the browser has access to the computer's hardware to speed up the experience of viewing 3D effects. To see what this looks like in action, Google offers a link to a Chrome experiment called "Shaun of the Sheep." This cute cartoon (which works only in Chrome), demonstrates how 3D CSS lets you rotate a video, scale it up and down, turn the reflection on and off and activate a rotating carousel of videos.

In addition to 3D CSS Transforms, the experiment also takes advantage of hardware-accelerated HTML5 and the new audio-video format, WebM, open-sourced by Google last year.

More Security Tools

Also new in this release are enhancements to Google's Safe Browsing technology, which has now been improved to warn you before you download certain malicious files. Chrome has improved this detection process so that it can detected the malicious files without having ever seen what URL you visited. More details on that process are described here.

Bye-bye, Flash Cookies!

Google's close relationship with Adobe has allowed it to integrate Flash LSO (local shared objects) deletion right into the Web browser, so you can better manage your online privacy. These objects, often referred to as "Flash cookies" are similar to their "browser cookies" counterparts, in that they contain information used to customize your Web browsing experience, or hold data like your login info for a website. Unfortunately, Flash cookies are harder to delete than regular cookies - until now, Chrome users were only able to manage or delete cookies using this online tool. Now, you'll be able to delete the cookies from your browser Settings. Just click on the Wrench, go to Tools, Clear Browsing Data and select "Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data."

And More...

You can also launch your Chrome Web apps by name within the Omnibox in Chrome 12, the Settings pages have been updated, there's improved screen reader support and finally, you can say farewell to Google Gears. The Gears plugin will no longer be supported in this or any future releases of Google Chrome to provide offline access to Web applications. Those duties will be taken over by HTML5 going forward, starting with Gmail Offline, expected by Q3 2011.

Google Chrome is a favorite among power users in no small part due to its innovative experimental features (many of which are eventually integrated into the stable browser). For our final installment of the best of Google Labs, we're taking a look at the best experimental, advanced features you can add to Google Chrome.More »

<!-- videoId: aFWP-nltqfk --><!-- /videoId: aFWP-nltqfk --> Firefox: LessChrome HD is a Firefox extension made by the folks at Mozilla that hides Firefox's address bar by default,

Google has launched a test extension for its Chrome Web browser and browser-based Chrome OS computer operating system which seems to solve the problem of easily moving photos from a camera to online services like Google's Picasa. This is more of challenge for Google's so-called "cloud" operating system, Chrome OS, which is little more than a Web browser running on a notebook computer.

The new extension called "Picasa Uploader" appeared only days ago, just ahead of the start of Google's developer conference, Google I/O, which begins tomorrow in San Francisco. Will the extension launch at that time? How will it work? We don't know yet, but the possibilities are intriguing.

What's the Picasa Uploader?

The Picasa uploader extension, available here, is, according to reports, now automatically appearing on Cr-48 computers, the test hardware in the hands of users, journalists, developers and other early adopters of Google's Chrome OS. We found the extension on our Chrome OS notebook too, for what it's worth.

The extension was created by Kan Liu, who goes by the username kannmnliu online, including within the Chrome Web Store. Kan Liu is a Senior Product Manager at Google, and involved in Chrome OS project. He's also the creator of this Speed theme for Chrome OS users.

The description for this new Picasa extension reads simply: "Not for general use. This is for testing only." The fact that the installation is publicly available, and even installable, makes us wonder if it's about to be switched on for real-world use sometime this week.

At present, you can install the extension, but it seems to be inactive. We tried plugging a camera into our Cr-48 notebook, but nothing happened, even when visiting the "upload" photos section of Picasa's online service. (Let us know if you experience other results).

Why This Little Extension Matters

While a seemingly minor update, if Google was to provide a functional tool like this for uploading files from a peripheral device directly to the "cloud," (in this case, Picasa), then it would have addressed on the few remaining hurdles in using an Internet-only operating system. It's one of the many things we wondered about back in summer of 2009, when Google first announced Chrome OS.

Several of Chrome OS's challenges have since been overcome, including the issue of printing (via Google Cloud Print), running third-party applications (via the Chrome Web Store), spotty Wi-Fi coverage (via 3G access) and more. In truth, the biggest challenge with Chrome OS at present is the shoddy test hardware, which isn't really a reflection on the OS itself. While Chrome OS is nowhere near being able to replace desktop computing and the powerful locally installed applications like Office and Photoshop that run best on users' hard drives, it has come a long way to making casual, cloud-based computing possible.

The only big question now is whether consumers want cloud-based notebooks at all, and if so, at what price? We may find out more about Chrome OS this week, as it's expected the product will, at last, launch commercially thanks to Google's hardware partners. The news is expected to arrive during Google I/O. Stay tuned.