Tag Archives: chrome

April 11, 2013, 11:00 am

Fix Tab Overload in Chrome with OneTab

If you’re like me, you probably have more than a couple of tabs open on your browser of choice. If you’re a lot like me, then you actually have three different browser windows open with the number of tabs in each window ranging from five to thirty-seven. There are a lot of reasons to have all those tabs open, we tell ourselves: it’s for a blog post; it’s for my research; it’s something that won’t save well in Pocket or Instapaper. And all of those things may be true. But what is also true is that all of these tabs take a toll on your computer’s performance.

What you real need is the ability to get all of these tabs summarized into one handy place. A way to keep them as a list without having to copy and paste URLs, so you can get back to what you want to read when you have the time. What you need, it turns out, is OneTab. OneTab is a free, simple extension for the Chrome browser. The…

March 20, 2013, 8:00 am

Handy Browser Extensions

By Amy Cavender

No doubt many of our readers do a significant proportion of their work in a browser window; that’s certainly true of many of the members of the ProfHacker team.

Extensions can make our browsers more useful for us, or at least help us to accomplish some of our browser-based tasks a little more efficiently. A recent ZDNet article took a quick look at several extensions for Chrome; though many of the extensions listed there are most suited to web developers, the article prompted me to take a look at my own Chrome extensions.

What I discovered was that, while I don’t use very many extensions, I use the relatively few I have a lot, often in combination with one another. Here’s what I’ve got installed:

Evernote Web Clipper. Evernote’s a big part of my workflow; being able to add materials without having to leave my browser is very handy.
Pocket. Pocket is my reading…

March 1, 2013, 11:00 am

Drive Notepad: A Browser-Based Text Editor for Google Docs

By George Williams

On Monday, I showed you how to host a website on Google Drive, which is a free and easy hosting solution. What if you want to edit the content you’ve uploaded to your website? Well, in a helpful comment, ProfHacker reader Chris Clark points us to a Google Drive app called Drive Notepad, which turns out to be a pretty darned impressive text editor: “View and edit all kinds of text documents in your browser. Includes syntax highlighting for many scripting and programming languages.”

This app is not affiliated with Google, but is the creation of a developer listed as “DM” on the app’s page. To use Drive Notepad, you need to first get the browser Google Chrome (if you’re not already using it) and then go to this page in the Chrome Web Store, where you can install the app. (For help with installing, managing, and uninstalling Google Drive apps, check out this help page.)

I’ve only just …

August 29, 2011, 11:00 am

Taking Zotero out of the Browser with the Zotero Standalone Beta

By Mark Sample

Last week the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media announced the release of a new beta of the standalone version of Zotero, an open source reference manager and ProfHacker favorite.

Zotero has long existed as an extension within Firefox, but since the release of the alpha standalone version in January, it’s been possible to more or less use Zotero with other browsers, such as Safari or Chrome, on any of the major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux).

The new beta brings added features, greater stability, and—I can’t help noticing—a better icon. I’ve been using the standalone Zotero for the past few days, and I’m happy to say it’s been working quite well. Using the Chrome connectors, I’ve been able to save references from journal databases and the like as easily from Chrome as from Firefox.

I’ll update ProfHacker when I have a better feel for Zotero Standalone, but I…

May 17, 2011, 3:00 pm

Recovering Lost In-Browser Writing with the Lazarus Extension

By Mark Sample

It doesn’t matter how stable your computer is or how stable your web browser is, at some point, your browser will crash. It seems that the chances of your browser crashing are directly proportional to the importance of whatever it was you were working on at the time.

And my own empirical analysis, conducted at great personal cost, demonstrates that the chances of a crash are exponentially higher if you happen to be in the middle of writing something in your browser, say, composing a lengthy blog post or writing a detailed comment to someone else’s blog.

If your browser hasn’t crashed when you were writing in it, just wait. It will.

Do yourself a favor then, and immediately install the Lazarus: Form Recovery extension, which automatically saves everything you write on the web in an SQLite database on your computer. If your computer or browser crashes, simply reopen the web page, …

February 15, 2011, 11:00 am

Working with Zotero Standalone (Alpha)

By Mark Sample

Several weeks ago Jason observed in his Weekend Reading that the folks at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University had released an alpha “standalone” version of Zotero. Zotero has long been a ProfHacker favorite, and many of us here and elsewhere were excited to be able, finally, to use Zotero without using Firefox, the browser for which Zotero was originally designed as an extension.

And Zotero Standalone is indeed standalone. It looks exactly like the regular Zotero, but running in a separate, resizable window. After installing the “connectors” you can even save items to Zotero from Chrome or Safari, using the familiar icons that appear in those browsers’ location bar (Chrome) or main toolbar (Safari).

The Zotero team has provided a thorough introduction to the standalone Zotero, so there’s no need to duplicate those instructions here. However, it’s worth…

September 28, 2010, 8:00 am

Five Nifty Tricks in Google Chrome

By Kathleen Fitzpatrick

It’s likely that somebody’s already told you about the wonders of Google’s browser, Chrome. That someone may even have been Julie, in her post Using Google Chrome and Chrome Extensions for Speed and Productivity. Chrome’s got an awful lot going for it: it’s fast, it’s lightweight, and it’s super-stable—and as web applications become more complex, that last is increasingly important. If you’ve ever had Firefox crash when you’ve got multiple tabs open, you’ll know what I mean. In Chrome, each tab and window runs as a separate process, and so the worst that a bad Flash application can do is cause the tab it’s in to fail.

But beyond simple stability and speed, Chrome’s got a lot of options available. Here are a few nifty tricks that might help make your browsing experience that much better.

1. Extensions

As Julie discussed in her earlier post, Chrome has hundreds of available