google chrome

[Tip] Enable Web Apps In Chrome 8

by

chrome web store

Google has recently launched the Chrome Web Store, where you can find number of web apps  , extensions and themes for Google Chrome. If you want to enable the web apps in the recently released Google Chrome 8 (they’ll show up when you open a new tab), follow these steps:

1. Make sure Google Chrome is not running on your computer.

2. If you are on a Windows machine, right-click on the Chrome shortcut, and choose “Properties” from the context menu. In the “Target” filed under “Shortcut” tab, append it with   “ --enable-default-apps" (without quotes but with the initial space). In general, the target field should look like this:

C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-default-apps

Chrome shortcut properties

3. Click “OK” to save the settings and close the properties window.

4. Click  the wrench icon, chrome tools menuTools > Extensions.

5. Expand the “Developer mode” Developer mode iconicon.

6. Click on the “Update extensions now” button.

chrome extensions page

7. Open a new tab and now you must see the all the web apps that are currently enabled for your Chrome. The default web apps are Google Docs, Google Calender, Gmail etc.

Apps page in Google Chrome

This tutorial is intended for Google Chrome 8 running on Windows machine, if your are on Mac or Linux, you might want to read the original story at  Google OS blog.

Get A Cr-48 Chrome Notebook As Part Of The Google’s Pilot Program

by

Google Chrome OS

Google has yesterday officially announced the details of the upcoming Google Chrome OS and also showcased the first ever Chrome OS laptop called “Cr-48 Chrome Notebook”. The netbook will have a 12.1-inch screen with a full sized (but tweaked a bit) keyboard, Qualcomm Gobi 3G chip (Verizon-only in US), Wi-Fi, more than 8 hours of usage on battery, a webcam and flash storage. The keyboard has been made such a way that there are no traditional “Caps lock” and “function” keys on it. Instead a new “Search” key has been added in place of the “Caps lock” key, which lets you quickly access the Google search just with a click. The full keyboard looks almost similar to that of Apple’s keyboard.

Cr-48 Chrome OS laptop

Google has launched a Chrome OS Pilot Program, through which it will initially distribute the Cr-48 Chrome OS laptops to those who are really interested in testing them out. Later, by mid-2011, laptop makers Acer and Samsung should be coming up with their own laptop models based on the Chrome OS. If you want to get this laptop, go here and apply.

Test drive Chrome notebook

Google is giving away only limited number of models for testing to interested users and if you are lucky (if you are in the US, chances are high!) you could also be one of those who get their hands on this notebook even before most of the others could get, Good luck!

via Engadget

Related: Is Chrome OS virus free?

[Tip] Force Chrome To Use Flash Player 10.2 Beta

by

Google Chrome logo

Adobe has recently updated the Flash Player and released the beta version of the Flash Player 10.2. The newer version included a major feature upgrades like Stage Video hardware acceleration which decreases your CPU utilisation when playing HD videos. When you download the flash player and install, you will understand that it’s only going to be used by all the browsers except Google Chrome. You may wonder why is Google Chrome left alone! But the fact is that Google Chrome (32-bit browser) includes a built-in Adobe Flash Player. Chrome automatically updates the Flash Player whenever there is new version of Chrome is released.

So even though you have installed the beta version of Flash Player 10.2, Chrome still uses the stable version of the flash player. To make Google Chrome use the 10.2 beta version instead, follow these steps:

1. Open Google Chrome, type about:plugins in the address bar and hit enter.

2. Expand the “Details” details button in chromebutton on the upper right corner

3. Under the “Flash”, you should see two versions, one is the integrated plug-in and the other is the system plug-in file.

If you are on Windows, the location of the integrated plug-in would be :

C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Applications\<version>\gcswf32.dll

location of the system plug-in would be:

C:\Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash\NPSWF32.dll

If you are on other platforms, these are file names for the integrated and system plug-ins:

Platform

Integrated Plug-in

System Plug-in

Windows

gcswf32.dll

NPSWF32.dll

Mac OS

Flash Player Plug-in for Chrome.plugin

Flash Player.plugin

Linux

libflashplayergc.so

libflashplayer.so

4. To force Chrome to use the beta version of the flash player, you must disable the integrated plug-in gcswf32.dll (i.e the plugin that is found in the Chrome folder) as shown. Click “Disable” button against it.

Disable integrated flash plugin in chrome

And when you have done that, it should look like this:

Disabled integrated flash plugin in chrome

That is it! Restart Google Chrome and see if the browser is able to load the flash content on the pages( ex: this Stage Video). If it is able to do, then it is to understood that the it is making use of the beta version of the flash player.

Note:

If you disable the Google Chrome’s integrated flash player plug-in, you will no longer receive the important security updates for the built-in plug-in and you need to use the system installed plug-in which has to be updated manually. Also, disabling this built-in Chrome plug-in will disable the Google Chrome’s sandboxing techniques incorporated to make the plug-in more secure. It is highly recommended that you use the integrated plug-in unless you really want to test some features using flash player beta on Chrome.

If you want to enable the integrated plug-in back, enable it in the step 4 to make run Chrome using it.

[via]

[Download] Google Chrome 8 Stable Version

by

Google Chrome 8

Google Chrome has just been updated to stable version 8.0.552.215. Google Chrome 8 is coming with over 800 bug fixes and other minor improvements. The big feature enhancements in Chrome 8 is the addition of a built in PDF viewer (and yes, it is secured in Chrome’s sandbox) and the latest version also updated to support the upcoming Google Chrome Web app store .

Download:

If you are already using an earlier version of Chrome, just click the wrench Chrome Tools button and choose “About Google Chrome”. Google Chrome’s “Auto update silent mode” should get you the the latest version of the Chrome. If it didn’t, it’ll for sure now when you choose to open “About Google Chrome” as shown here:

Google Chrome updating

Or if you may choose to download the Chrome online installer. If you want to download a standalone offline installer so that you can install it on any other computer without an active internet connection, you can do so by downloading the exe setup file from the following link:

Download Google Chrome 8 Offline Installer [23.42 MB]

[Tip] Paste Text Minus Formatting In Google Chrome

by

This might have happened to all of us- You are writing an email and you want to quote something from a webpage, you try to copy text and paste it in the email editor, you will see the original fonts, colors, spacing and styling attached to it, but you are just concerned about the plain text and you don’t want any sort of styling attached to it.

When the traditional Ctrl + V command just pastes the text with all formatting, Google Chrome team has developed an easy shortcut Ctrl + Shift + V command (Command + Shift + Option + V on Mac OS) to just “paste as plain text”.

Ctrl shift v chrome

Take a look at the following screenshot which highlights the advantage of this particular shortcut while writing an email in Google Chrome.

Chrome Shortcut for pasting text without formatting

You can use this keyboard shortcut for any rich editor like Gmail’s compose mode, or even in editing documents in Google docs etc. to remove all the unwanted formatting and styling from the text from webpages.

Via Google Chrome blog

Turn Off New Geolocation Feature In Google Chrome

by

google chrome logo

The latest beta (developer) version of Chrome, Google Chrome 5.0.375.23 Beta (Official Build 45690) is coming with a inbuilt geolocation feature that lets any website know the location of your computer once you allows access to track your physical location.(See the screenshot below).

Geolocation in Chrome
Well, this may be useful in many ways for websites that offer services based on your location, like Google Maps for instance.This feature gets activated when you click the small little circle at the upper left corner of your browser in Maps.

However if you are worried about your privacy, you shouldn’t allow access at the first place.If you have allowed access initially and later want to rollback and deny access to Google maps to track your location, you should follow the following steps:

Turning Off Geolocation In Google Chrome:

1. Click on the wrench chrome tools menuand click Options.

2. Go to Under the Hood tab

3. Under Privacy, click Content settings

Chrome options under the hood

4. Go to Location tab in the Content Settings

5. Choose “Do not allow any site to track my physical location”.

Chrome Content Settings

6. Close the settings windows.

That is it, Chrome won’t track your location to websites from now on, hope this small tutorial has helped you.For more tutorials and updates from us, you can subscribe to Techrena RSS feeds via email.

[How To] Save And Manage Google Chrome Sessions

by

google chrome logo

Almost all the browsers off late are coming up with an option to save and manage the browsing sessions.What it means is that you can save the entire session for later reading when you are in a hurry.For instance in Opera, you’ll find this option under File> Sessions>

session manager in opera

But where is such option in Google Chrome?

Ans: It isn’t there at least as of now.This is one of the most requested feature in Google Chrome.I wish the developers considers this in their future releases.

Tip #1: Even though, Google Chrome hasn’t got a default Sessions manager, it does however offer to save your currently opened tabs.For this, go to Wrench > Options > Basic tab> On Start up

Select “Reopen the pages that were open last”

This will save the current session and opens it up as it was when you last closed your Chrome.

Tip #2: There are some good extensions available, through which you can manage your sessions in Google Chrome.One such extension is Session Buddy.

With Session Buddy, you can view all of your tabs in each window of a current or saved session.

Session buddy

The extension also makes it possible to access saved crash recovery sessions automatically after a Chrome or OS crash.

You can also edit each saved session by deleting individual tabs or windows.

Entire session can be exported into a text or CSV format file.

Install Session Buddy

More Google Chrome resources:

Hide Most Visited Sites from New Tab in Google Chrome in Easy Steps

Enable GreaseMonkey User Scripts in Google Chrome

How to Download Video From YouTube in Google Chrome

Reopen or Recover Recently Closed Tabs in Google Chrome

[How To] Undo Clicking Never Save Password For This Site In Google Chrome

by

Google Chrome:

google chrome logo

Google Chrome by default offers the option to save password for any webpage that requires the users to be logged in.You can see the classic “Do you want Google Chrome to save your password?” alert whenever you enter username and password for any website.

google chrome save password

The users will have two options they can either choose “Save password” or “Never for this site”.If the user clicks “Never for this site”, no matter desirably or accidently, Google Chrome will no longer offer the prompt to save password for that login page.

Considering that you have clicked it accidentally and want to undo it, you can follow the steps given below to remove the site from save password prompt exception list.

Steps:

1. Click the Toolschrome tools menumenu.

2. Select “Options”

3. Click the “Personal Stuff” tab.

4.Click on “Show saved passwords”

chrome show saved passwords

4. Click on the “Exceptions” tab

5. Select the site that you want to remove from the list

chrome remove site exceptions list

6.Click “Remove” (or use “Remove All” to clear the list) and click “Close”.

Speed Dial For Google Chrome [Extension]

by

Speed Dial is a browser feature that was first introduced in Opera to quickly access your favorite websites.Later the same feature was extended to the other browsers thanks to the numerous extensions that made this possible.Here we are talking about an extension called Speed Dial for Chrome that lets you to add Speed dial feature to Google Chrome.With this you can replace Google Chrome’s default new tab page with colorful speed dial.

Once installed, the extension can be customized by adding your favorite websites but even if you configure them, it’ll set some default speed dial websites based on your browsing history.You can also customize the background color/image, search options etc., from the options menu.

You can also add any page that you are currently viewing to the speed dial by just clicking the speed dial icon that appears on the extreme right in the address bar.

speed dial chrome install

Speed dial chrome iconspeed dial chrome thumbnails

speed_dial_chrome_customization

RSS Subscription Extension For Google Chrome

by

Feed_subscription_Chrome_example

Unlike most of the other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera, Google Chrome doesn’t automatically gives a quick way to subscribe to RSS feeds in a web page with a single click.

If are very much used to the other browsers then you might be feeling inconvenient in Google Chrome due to lack of this quick RSS feeds subscription feature.

Well, if you are just worrying about this missing RSS subscriptions support, you should look at this great extension “RSS Subscription Extension” developed by Google.

This extension auto-detects RSS feeds on the page you are reading and upon finding one will display an RSS icon in the Omnibox, allowing you to click on it to preview the feed content and subscribe.

Also the extension has 4 predefined web-based feed readers (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines, My Yahoo).However you can add any web-based feed reader of your choice to this list.

install RSS subscription extension chrome

Here’s how any website offering RSS feeds will look like after installing this extension.Observe the RSS icon in the Omnibox.

RSS feed subscription icon chrome

Download RSS Subscription Extension for Chrome