extension

Twice in the last month I had to become reacquainted with Microsoft Office because a company I was working with required a genuine Office file. Both experiences made me appreciate Google Drive's simple, straightforward apps all over again.

Yes, there are tasks Google Drive's word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program can't handle well or at all, but for 99.9 percent of the files I work on, Google Drive fits the bill nicely. Here are five ways to use Google Drive to shave minutes off your workday.

Keyboard shortcut opens a list of keyboard shortcuts After a … Read more

One of the most infamous alerts for new e-mail, AOL's "you've got mail," is now available as a Chrome extension to alert you of new Gmail messages, as reported by Mashable.

Setup of the extension, aptly titled You've Got Mail, is all that lies between you and a trip down memory lane.

Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store.

Log in to your Gmail account. You can close the tab, or leave it open -- you'll be alerted either way.

Sit back and wait for a new e-mail, or send yourself one to … Read more

Ah, the Olympics. We get three weeks of athletic prowess, medal counts, moving personal stories, and slow-motion replay of swimmers touching the side of the pool. If you can't stand yet another headline about sporting glory, turn to the Olwimpics browser extension for relief.

Olwimpics' sole purpose in life is to expunge the Olympics from your browsing experience. It's available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It thoughtfully covers up keywords with Olympics-color blocks, though it doesn't make the accompanying images disappear.… Read more

The new tab screen in Chrome normally displays a thumbnail grid of your most visited sites or a list of your Chrome apps. But how often do you really make use of either of those screens? If you're a weather junkie, you might like a Chrome extension called Currently. It's a very simple extension that displays the current time, date, and weather forecast.

You can still access your old screens by clicking on the icon in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. If you don't like the dark color, you can change it to light (gray) or … Read more

What makes someone choose one browser over another? Often people use whichever browser is closest at hand: Internet Explorer in Windows and Safari on Macs.

Lots of folks choose Firefox because of the browser's many useful add-ons. But the best reason to go with one browser over another is speed. In my experience, no browser is faster than Google Chrome.

There's no easier way to start an argument among geeks than to claim one browser is the speed champ. If you look hard enough you can find a reliable study naming each of the most popular browsers the … Read more

The DeadMouse extension for Chrome might be the final piece of the puzzle if you are trying to go all keyboard shortcuts all the time. You can perform all manner of task in Chrome with keyboard shortcuts (here are helpful lists for PCs and for Macs), but opening a link still requires a click of the ol' mouse.

If losing your mouse is something you aspire to, give DeadMouse a whirl. With it, you simply start typing the first few letters of a link you see on the page you are viewing and the link will begin to wobble. Hit … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Tugging on Chrome's coat tails, the popular Dolphin browser has announced alongside the Google I/O developer conference a new framework for developers called Dolphin Garage.

Garage is an open API program for extending the functionality of Dolphin. Powered in part by Adobe Phonegap and Dolphin's own HTML5 framework called Engine, it will include the release of more than 150 APIs, which will allow developers to create their own add-ons for the browser.

Engine has proven to be a big boon for Dolphin, explained David Dehghan, technical architect at Dolphin. While at a W3C Web standards meeting … Read more

Scarabee Software's Siren is easy-to-use but powerful file-renaming freeware. It quickly renames, moves, or copies selected files using expressions you create. Suppose you want to rename all the images in a folder sequentially. Instead of manually renaming each in sequence, Siren can do the whole batch at once. It displays image previews and tags to help you be sure you've got the right files.

Siren is portable freeware that runs as soon as you click the program file without having to be installed or registered in Windows. When we first opened the program, a "first contact" … Read more

Google's RSS Subscription Extension for Chrome automatically scans pages for RSS feeds and lets you subscribe to them with a single click on the RSS icon in the Omnibar. You must be signed in to Google to use it. It works with Chrome in Incognito mode, too, and supports multiple feeds per page. RSS Subscription Extension is freeware.

As with other Chrome extensions, you might miss RSS Subscription Extension's installation if you blink or look away, and (unlike some other Web browsers) you don't need to restart Chrome to activate it. We opened the Extensions Manager page … Read more