My favourite feature with Gmail was its Offline mode. With Google Gears, it allowed people to compose and draft emails from the browser even if the user was offline and not connected to the internet. This was useful to people who connected online for a limited time or if they did not have very good connectivity.
As Google dropped support for Google Gears, Gmail in Offline mode was also not available with Chrome browser. Thankfully Offline Google Mail App for Chrome browser solves the problem.
Chrome’s ‘find on page’ let’s you find the words on any webpage but it’s not at all feature rich. You can’t get the position of the word unless and until you type the exact word (capitalization doesn’t matter).
efTwo (F2) is Chrome extension which replaces ‘find on page’ with a reliable keyword finder.
Features of efTwo
Hit Ctrl+Shift+F to launch. Find multiple keywords at once, unlike Chrome’s default ‘find on page’.
You don’t need to type the word perfectly, efTwo highlights the words even if one of the letter (you typed) matches. For example typing ‘Gmail’ is enough to find ‘Google Mail’.
Each keyword is given a different color to differentiate one from other.
efTwo remembers the keywords you typed before, so the words automatically load when you open the same site as before.
No annoying sounds if none of the words you typed matches with the words on the page.
efTwo Demo
Lazy to read? No problem, check the demo below, it covers everything.
efTwo works smoothly on HTTP connection, but I’m not sure about HTTPS one as it didn’t work on sites like Gmail, for me. Do tell us how it works for you.
I love Simplenote, especially its simplicity which Evernote, Springpad and other popular note taking apps lack. As I spend most of my time on the browser, I like to have extensions of the apps which I use the most.
SyncPad for Simplenote and SyncPad Webnotes are two extensions for Chrome which ease the task of taking notes and syncing them.
Quickly create notes by selecting text on any webpage, right click and choose “create a webnote”.
It doesn’t store anything locally, everything is synced to your Simplenote account.
Pin important notes, pinned notes show up first in the order.
Tag notes for better search, just tag any note with an Email address to send the note to your friends.
Create floating sticky notes on any webpage*.
Works offline too.
*You need to install SyncPad Webnotes to make sticky notes on SyncPad. The author also gives an explanation on why he made a new extension (SyncPad Webnotes) when he could combine both into a single extension.
Chrome is my favorite browser. Its clean user-interface, speed, instant page loading, a lots of apps and extension etc make it a browser to reckon with. Chrome Apps give a different angle to the browser and one of my favourite ways to unwind is to play games on Chrome.
I am sharing 5 games that can be played offline on Chrome.
#1. Angry Birds
Angry Birds is one of the most famous games around. Game is based on the revenge of birds from the green pigs who stolen their eggs . There are about 189 levels and 21 more levels in Chrome dimension.
A wonderful Chrome app for chess fans. This game has 3 levels beginners (cordy), intermediate (Claire) and advanced (Boris). Select multiplayer and type user name and password or register to start playing with other online players. It also allows looking up stats accumulated from your performance while playing the game.
This one is straight and simple game where users need to avoid touching the red-spotted dots while dragging the mouse pointer. As one goes to a higher level the number of dots too increase. The simplicity of the game makes it very addictive.
Magic cube is classic Rubik’s cube game. This like the real Rubik’s cube is extremely addictive. It is a real brain teaser. This game also supports offline play, thanks to HTML5 caching.
If you have been to a mini-golf course, then you will surely enjoy this game.
Another Good Chrome games from Fupa.com. This is not the actual golf game but quite similar to it, hence called mini-golf. This apps has 9 course which you can explore. An added feature of this game is it can be embedded on a website.
If you’re a Chrome fan, like me, you must have installed any of the bleeding edge versions of Chrome, be it Chrome Dev, Canary or even Chromium. The Chrome team has worked on a new start page since a month and starting from Chrome Dev, all the upper channels can use that feature now.
What’s new in this start page?
Everything! Yes, they have changed everything. The new start page’s UI looks a lot like a tablet interface. Here are its features.
The thumbnails of most visited sites are much bigger and cleaner now with respective favicons on them.
Initially, the start page is divided into 3 sections – Most Visited, Apps and Bookmarks.
However, you can make new sections by dragging the site from Most Visited section into a new section, you can rename it.
You can rename the sections by double clicking the tab and changing it to whatever you want. Note that you can’t rename Most Visited and Bookmarks tab.
You can remove a site from most visited by dragging into Remove From Chrome box.
You can find the list of closed tabs from the Recently Closed menu on the extreme bottom-right.
The Bookmarks tab showcases your bookmarks visually.
You can add some good effects to the new start page by enabling “New Apps Install Bubble” in about:flags
If you run any bleeding edge channels of Chrome, drop your opinions on this redesign.
No doubt, Firefox is a good browser. But, in my opinion, it’s not the best. I personally love Chrome a lot and I often wonder why people don’t migrate to Chrome. I’m not against Firefox, I just want to tell you that there’s a better option. You may reverse question me, why don’t you switch to Firefox? I do have some valid points, read on!
#1. Interface
I love playing with Chrome tabs, they are that flexible. You can rearrange them easily, drag them or merge them. Firefox interface has evolved a lot, especially Firefox 4.0 was a real breakthrough.
You may know about the recent theme Firefox is working on, that’s Australis and the next versions of Firefox would come with that theme preloaded. Now Australis’ interface is appealing but it resembles a lot with Chrome, for example the curvy tabs and light colors are used by Chrome initially. It seems Firefox is also copying Chrome for its interface.
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#2. Start Page
Start page or a New Tab page is one of the basic features the Chrome browser and Firefox doesn’t have one. I know, there are many add-ons like Speed Dial which can provide an elegant start page but like everyone but I don’t prefer add-ons in the first place. If you’re using Chrome Dev or Canary, you might know about the new start page the Chrome team is working on. It’s much better than the previous one in terms of UI.
#3. Apps
Apps are different from extensions/add-ons, they are actually introduced for Chromebooks but now they can be installed on the Chrome browser itself. You may consider apps as slightly modified websites, for example, the SpringPad app and the Angry birds app for Chrome gives offline access (which is not available in other browsers) unlike the native websites.
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#4. Instant Pages
This is a Chrome-only feature by Google. Whenever you search on Google, it pre-renders the webpage of the first search result, so it will take only a nano second (that’s 10 to the power of -9) to load, irrespective of your internet speed (even on a Dial-up connection). Unless and until Mozilla teams up with Google to support this feature in Firefox, Instant Pages will be Chrome-only.
#5. Mozilla’s history of borrowing from Chrome..
Whenever any Chrome feature ends up as a big hit, Mozilla starts working on it. This is not new, there are many instances and here are some of them.
LessChromeHD: When Chrome released Compact Navigation feature, just then Firefox released LessChromeHD which can be found in Mozilla Labs.
Channels: Remember? Chrome was the first to classify browsers based on the frequency of updates, that’s channels and Firefox copied this very soon.
Firefox Sync: Chrome Sync is one of the oldest features of Chrome and Firefox started supporting sync with its 4.0 version.
Instant Preview: Chrome has developed Chrome Instant and it’s available even in the most stable release of Chrome, while Mozilla is working on Instant Preview which is still in Mozilla Labs.
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Conclusion
These are just the major features Firefox is missing, but apart from these there are also features like Chrome Profiles (Profiles doesn’t have a GUI in Firefox), Auto-Translate, Auto-Fill, Cloud Print, frequency of updates and many more.
Chrome also misses some features like toolbar customization and Panaroma, but there are not many. Finally, at the end of the day, it all comes to personal choice but rising popularity of Chrome shows what people are choosing.
Which is your primary browser? Firefox or Chrome? Or something else? Do drop in your comments.
Cloud Reader is a new web app by Amazon with which you can read the Kindle books you bought. Amazon offers Kindle for PC which does the same thing, but a web app is always useful.
Features of Cloud Reader
Read Kindle books online or even offline.
Has a really nice customizable interface, wish Google Reader has something like this.
Ability to bookmark pages while reading long ebooks.
Ebooks can be downloaded for offline reading. To download an Ebook, right-click on the Ebook cover and select Download and Pin Book. You can use downloaded Ebooks from the Downloaded section.
You can also sync the last page read with your Kindle (if you have one!), so you need to search for that page again.
Amazon’s Kindle store does have many free Ebooks apart from paid ones, all you need is a Kindle account to get the Ebook.
Cloud Reader currently supports only Chrome and Safari. Do drop in your comments.
Chrome is one of the fastest browser and hence being used widely. Chrome has some nice built-in features to save passwords for websites you might be visiting regularly. Most people who use Chrome extensively might be aware that the browser can save passwords, but many are unaware we can manage those passwords or individually delete only certain passwords.
Many times we want to delete some of these passwords and but not all of them. For example banking websites or other websites which you do not visit anymore.
Managing Saved Passwords in Chrome
Click on the wrench icon at top right corner of your browser. When you click on it a drop down menu option appears where you can find the ‘Options‘.
Options are separated into 3 categories “Basic“,”PersonalStuff“, “UndertheBonnet“.
Click on “Personal Stuff” from this menu. This option will allow you to customize some the personal aspects of the browser which includes syncing data, theme.
Check your Password options here. Click on “Manage saved passwords…” button and now we can access all the passwords saved on Chrome.
Clicking on the password, we get an option asking you to “show” the password. This is useful if you have forgotten your password but have it saved on your browser.
Click on the ‘X’ symbol to delete the particular password saved on Chrome.
Alternately you can access this window by typing chrome://settings/password into address bar. 😉
Do drop in your comments.
Editor’s Note:This post was a Guest Post by Manendra. Would you like to write one for us? Do check this link.
The world of browsers has changed over the past few years. If you notice, most new features and updates are about Chrome in the blogging world. Firefox and Internet Explorer do get covered but a lot less.
This has been reflected in the growth of Chrome, along with the decline of Internet Explorer. Firefox seems to be stagnating and even declining a bit in the past six months.
Last year Internet Explorer was at 51% and has steadily declined to 42% by the end of July 2011. In the same time-frame, Firefox which was at 31% has also declined to somewhere around 27%. Chrome which was at 10% is now sitting at an impressive 22%.
This mean Chrome is the only browser which is actually growing.
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Why is Chrome so successful?
Unlike Firefox and IE, which treat their browsers versions as reinvented new software released once a year, Google treats Chrome like ‘work in progress’. Small updates are made periodically every few weeks.
Chrome also has continuity for its users because of small but many updates. When people upgraded to Firefox 4, there was a big change from the UI of the browser to other features. The same could be said about Internet Explorer 9.
At the moment it seems like Chrome will soon become the most used browser, unless IE or Firefox comes up with something really different.
What are your views on the growth of Chrome and the decline of Internet Explorer? Do drop in your comments.
If you are using Chrome, you might want to check if your browser has updated recently. The new updated version showcases Instant Pages and Print Preview.
These features were not available with the stable version of Chrome but might be familiar to Chrome users who used their beta versions.
Both features will be enabled on the new Chrome version by default.
Instant Pages Features
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Chrome uses the browsing history and search history (if you are logged into your Google account) to calculate which links you are most likely to click on.
Chrome will pre-render results when it calculates that a particular link is mostly liked to be clicked by a user.
This will be enabled automatically on your Chrome browser after it updates. To disable it, look up the Options under the wrench icon and under ‘Basics’ check ‘Search’ section which allows you to uncheck ‘Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing’.
A video below to showcase the difference Instant Pages make.
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Print Preview on Chrome
Chrome also has Print Preview feature enabled in stable version. This will allow you to look up how print out would look. Good news is we can Print to PDF. Just right-click on a webpage or PDF and click on Print.
Print preview option should open up as shown in image below.
This is available only on Windows and Linux while Mac users will see Print Preview enabled in the next update in all probability.
Do check out the new feature if you are a Chrome addict like me and drop in your comments.
