Enhancing Productivity of Google Chrome through Extensions!

Hi Guys,

Google Chrome has become a primary browser for most of us. Though there are lot of people using Firefox and Opera, I find people commonly using Google Chrome. Today I experimented with a few extensions and thought that these extensions would be useful for you. They enhance your browsing experience. There are lot of extensions and you might find many other extensions useful or better, I am just sharing extensions that appealed me.

Ad Block Plus

Annoyed by all the Pop Up Ads and Banner Ads in Websites. This is the best way to filter them. After installing this Extension, I am having no trouble with Ads in any of the sites. Particularly, I used to face lot of trouble in ESPN Cricinfo and Times of India, where an Ad would just pop up and disturb. Now, no such Ads come. The best thing about this is that it filters the Advertisement Videos on Youtube too. You can enjoy Ad less videos.

Link: Chrome Store - Ad Block Plus

Disconnect

There are lot of invisible websites that track your movement when you visit certain sites and slow down the speed of your browsing. They also make note of your data making your browsing unsecure. In order to avoid this, install Disconnect. It cancels all the requests made by such sites.

Link: Chrome Store - Disconnect

Lightshot

Taking Screenshot is a big headache many times. You need to Print the Screen and crop the image. This extension gives you an easy way of taking Screenshot and gives many options to process them.

Link: Chrome Store - Lightshot

Buffer

This is extremely useful if you use Facebook and Twitter frequently. This helps you to buffer your posting in such a way that more users note it. It also has a URL shortener and an easy RT option.

Link: Chrome Store - Buffer

WOT

WOT stands for Web of Trust. You find lot of links when browsing. You are not entirely sure as to whether they are not safe or not. This Extension just gives you a green signal near the link if the website is safe. I have used this in past too and it is a very reliable means of finding out a site’s reliability.

Link: Chrome Store - WOT

MediaPlus

Mediaplus helps you to view Images and Videos with enhanced features. You can zoom images, videos and move them across. It would be useful, if you see lot of videos often.

Link: Chrome Store - MediaPlus

mxHero

The name is quite confusing, but this extension enhances your Gmail by providing many options like tracking your email, scheduling your email and keeping your mail private.

Link: Chrome Store - mxHero

Turn Off the Lights

This extension is simple. If you view a video and donot want disturbances, click the Bulb button and the surrounding area would turn dark.

Link: Chrome Store - Turn off the Lights

I also found some other interesting extensions like Night Reading Mode to enhance Night Reading, Neat Bookmarks to have a more organized Bookmark folder and Page Rank Status, which gives you all the important ranks of a website.

There are many other similar apps and extensions in the Web Store. If you search for sometime, you have all chances of landing in a gold mine that would improve your productivity.

Happy Reading!

A few of my recent experiences!

Hi Guys,

It’s been long since I wrote ‘The First Week of summer’. It’s nice to meet you again through my words.

I was totally engaged in my college works, either writing assignments or drawing machine parts and assembling them in Solidworks. For the past week, I’ve been sleeping by midnight. The only entertainment in between these times was the IPL matches. But sadly, till now I’m not able to watch a full match. Apart from these things, I watched the movie ‘Sherlock Holmes’ yesterday.

A New Browser, A new Experience!

Last week, I downloaded the new Opera 10.5 browser. It was advertised as the World’s Fastest Browser. Earlier I’ve used Opera 9.27, but was not attracted by that. Apart from that I’ve used IE6, Safari browsers and I’m currently using IE8, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

Of these I’m not comfortable with IE8 as it crashes often. I use Google Chrome to check mails and Firefox for extended usage like reading, surfing. I’m most comfortable with Firefox, since it provides a large range of features (add-ons). So, I use Firefox for 90% of my browsing.

Initially I was not interested with the Opera browser. A few days back I used it in my college for surfing and found it impressive. So, I decided to download. In the Opera website, I found that it had some additional facilities like Opera Turbo, Unite and Link. It had independent widgets too.

Opera Turbo increases the speed of the website by a particular factor, normally 2X or 3X. In my short usage, I found that Google and Gmail loaded faster than Chrome or Firefox. But if there were lot of elements in the website, then there was difficulty. For instance, some of the widgets in my blog did not load.

There was lot of Opera Widgets in the website. Some were very useful. I downloaded two of those gadgets. One was the Google gadget that contained all the Google icons like Google, Blogger, Orkut, Gmail, etc. Another one was EBook Reader. A fantastic gadget for a book lover like me! It contains a lot of stored books. We can just download them and read them. I was able to find a lot of famous books like Sherlock Holmes (the complete series), some Augusta Christie Novels, Alice in Wonderland, Around the World in 80 days, etc. On the whole I liked the new Opera browser.

Are you a Gmail user? Then Read This

In the recent times, a lot of my friends have lost their Gmail IDs, i.e., they have been hacked. Also, many have received warnings from Gmail to change their password. Gmail has increased it security features. Particularly it has introduced mobile phone recovery. Incase if you forget your password, then Google will send a sms to you. Most of them who lost their IDs had forgotten the answers for recovery questions.

Frustrating Internet Connection

The Internet Speed has been so poor in my home for so long. Even I can manage with the speed, but the connection crashes so often. There was lot of problem from the day we got this connection. Complaints and enquiries don’t help a bit. Last week, mom made a complaint and we were assured we would get a better connection, but there is no improvement. I can’t believe that India’s largest broadband provider’s service is so poor. I’m dead sure that a private sector company will overtake it in a few days.

A lot of things didn’t go well for me this week. But whatever happens happens for a reason and life just goes on. Hope to have a very good week ahead.

Happy Reading!!!