Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Three Chrome extensions that can make your cyberlife easier

Three Chrome extensions that can make your cyberlife easier:
Chrome PaintingsThere are tons and tons of Chrome extensions available to do nearly anything you can think of within your browser. The problem is that this can be overwhelming and make it difficult to find out about the ones that are the most useful to you. With that in mind, I have put together a short list of three free extensions that I use on a regular basis and that you, dear reader, will hopefully find useful as well. The extensions are: Tab Queue, MkMenu, and Shut Up.

Tab Queue

Tab Queue helps to organize the various pages you have open at one time. Mkmenu makes taking action on various websites easier and faster, and Shut Up (my personal favorite) allows you to disable the ‘comments’ section on pages that you choose.
Tab Queue Screen 1Tab Queue Screen 2
Tab Queue is a nifty extension that lets you take any page on the web, and place it into a ‘queue’ or waiting list on Chrome’s toolbar. This is supremely handy for those of us who have lots of tabs open at one time. I usually have the following experience with the web: I am browsing to a certain page for whatever reason, and some other link catches my eye, but I don’t have time to check it out right that second, or I don’t want to be distracted from what I am doing at the moment. Tab Queue lets me place the page that has caught my interest into a waiting list, basically, that I can then access via the Tab Queue button on my toolbar. When you click the button, it will take you to the most recent page you put into it, effectively spitting the pages out in reverse order. So, with Tab Queue enabled while I am working, I can stack up pages that look interesting, and then go back through them when I have the time and inclination to do so. It’s simple, easy, and effective, as any browser extension should be.
Get Tab Queue here!

MkMenu

MkMenu Screen 1MkMenu Screen 2
MkMenu, otherwise known as ‘Marking Menu’  is another handy extension that will let you use contextual circle menus, or “pie menus” to select various different actions on any page you are viewing. Essentially, it replaces the usual Windows context menu that pops up when you right click on a page. It will show common actions that can be taken from that page, including things like: going forward or back a page, or searching selected text with a particular search engine of your choice. It also supports mouse gesture control so that you can activate menu selections even faster once you are familiar with them. Gamers, in particular, may find this extension familiar and useful, since these kinds of menus have been used in many popular programs like The Sims or Crysis.
Get MkMenu here!

Shut Up

Shut Up Screen 1
Shut Up is one of my favorite Chrome extensions, and not just because the name is fun to say when someone asks you what extension you’re using to hide comments. It’s a very basic extension but what it does is invaluable to some folks. If you are like me, there are lots of web pages you visit that have comments sections. Many of these comments sections can contain useful information but, more often than not, they are a list of vapid and ridiculously unhelpful (not to mention poorly spelled) comments like, “Rhianna is stoopit, how come she don make peeple work fer no cash that is dum” and such. Now, maybe you’re the sort of person who finds that kind of comment helpful, but if you’re not, then Shut Up can help. It will disable comments on all web pages (if it can) by default, and you can add pages to an exception list with the click of a button. Any page on the exception list will show comments, at least until you get tired of them and tell the page to Shut Up again.
Get Shut Up here!

There you have it. Three of the most useful extensions in Chrome that I know about. If you like or dislike them, tell me why in the comments section! Until next time, my friends!

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