Change Google Chrome New Tab to Blank Page
Google Chrome can be considered a fresh web browser which still lacks of some features. One of it is the ability to change the new tab page to something else. For now, whenever you open a new tab, Google Chrome preloads it with the eight most visited sites which is in image squares or thumbnails on the top and also recently closed windows and tabs as links at the bottom.
This can pose as a privacy risk issue because a person that borrows your computer for a while to check their web mail could end up seeing what websites you always visit. You can remove the websites that is listed in new tab by clearing the histories but that would cause inconvenience by always have to type the full URL.
Until the development team of Google Chrome comes out with an option to change the new tab page, you can use the extension called Blank New Tab. After installing this extension, every time you open a new tab will show a blank page (chrome://newtab/) and not the thumbnails of top visited websites and recently closed tabs. Blank New Tab extension is very small and it worked perfectly on Chrome.
Google Web History Records Search and Visited Websites
April 14, 2010 by admin
Filed under Google, Online Service
Google is well known for its search engine and also its free email service Gmail but they have many more and one of it that not many people know about is Google Web History. Basically Google Web History lets you view and search across the full text of the pages you’ve visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time.
If you have a Gmail account, you can login to Google Web History website with the same credentials and enable the service. Once enabled and you are logged in to Google, any searches performed from Google search engine will be recorded and saved to your Google Web History. If you have a Google Toolbar installed, we are not sure to say if it is better or worse because EVERY website you visited and EVERY search you performed will be saved into your Google Web History account. Some people would say that it is a privacy intrusion but some would say that it is useful since they can always track what great websites they have visited but forgotten.
To clear all the saved searches and visited links, you can click on the Remove Items link at the right sidebar, and then click the Clear Entire Web History. You can pause the Web History recordings by clicking the Pause link at the sidebar. If you want to disable and remove the Google Web History service, click My Account at the top right and click the Edit link at My Products. At the delete a product, click on Remove Web History permanently.
Basically the usefulness of this service very much depends on the user. It can be a very useful online web history where you can refer back to the links that you have visited anywhere on any computer but it will be bad if someone logged in to your account illegally and checked what you have searched or sites that you normally visit.
Remove Annoying Comments on Popular Websites
Most websites by default allow visitors to post comments on the content at the webpage. Commenting can be turned off by the webmaster but allowing comments can somehow boost the page ranking because it looks like an active and alive topic instead of dead and boring. There are pros and cons on enabling comments and there are times when some weird people just post nonsense in the comments area or perhaps a spammer posted a malicious link.
Sometimes you prefer not to have a long list of posted comments appearing on the article that you want to read which lags the scrolling of the page, so here is a Google Chrome extension called No Comments which is able to turn off comments, with the ability to turn them back on, on a per-site basis. No Comments does not work on all websites but currently supports 36 websites including some popular ones like YouTube, Digg, CNN, Yahoo.
After installing No Comments extension, if you visit any of the supported websites, the comments are automatically disabled. You can turn it back on by clicking the CO icon and shifting the slider to On. We have tested the turning on and off on the comments it doesn’t seem to work. Probably the author of No Comments extension is not aware of this bug. We have tested more in detailed and found that No Comments only hides the comments but doesn’t disable it from loading in the first place. Bandwidth is not saved but it gives a cleaner look.
Show Only Image From Image Hosting Websites such as ImageShack
There are many image hosting websites that allows users to upload images, photos and pictures which allows anyone to view it publicly by sharing the link. However there are a few types of links provided by the image hosting site such as the link, direct link, widget code, forum code, alt forum code, HTML code, forum thumnail, alt forum thumbnail and HTML thumbnail. For a user that don’t know much about computer, most probably they will be sharing the link instead of direct link.
The different between the two links are the link sends the user to the image hosting website with a lot of garbage on the page such as advertisements and etc. As for the direct link, it is a link only to show the image and nothing more.
Firefox will require GreaseMonkey extension together with the userscript and Chrome with just the extension called Show Just Image to remove all the junk from the normal image hosting link and showing only the image. This saves you from having to click another time on the thumbnail to zoom and view the image in full. Show Just Image currently supports 90 image hosting sites including some of the popular ones such ImageShack, Photobucket, flickr, tinypic… There is nothing you need to do, just install and the extension will detect and redirect automatically to the direct image link.
Download Show Just Image Firefox Userscript | Chrome Extension
SearchPreview Adds Thumbnail Website Preview for Google Search Engine
All of major search engine such as Google, Yahoo and Bing allows user to search for webpages based on keywords. The search results only contains the title of the webpage, URL and a short description. There won’t be any thumbnail preview included because of two simple reasons why is to make the search faster and also to save the searcher’s bandwidth. However some people may prefer to have a real time generated thumbnail to know the status of the website because the search engine are not fast enough to crawl the website for the latest information. For example, some sites appear on the search result but clicking on it shows under maintenance…
An easy way to have a thumbnail preview is by installing SearchPreview for Google extension for Chrome browser. After installation the plugin, you will see an extra thumbnail preview of the website generated in real time on the right side of the search results.
Do note that using this extension is very different than the Shows Options > Images from the page option in the Google Search page. The Images from the page option takes the images from Google Images but the extension creates a live thumbnail preview for the search result. If you haven’t noticed, selecting the Images from the page option gives out search results very differently compared to the normal keyword search.
Download SearchPreview for Google
Download Standalone Google Chrome for Offline Installation
Google Chrome is one of the fastest and lightest web browser developed by Google and is free for everyone to use. The official website to download Google Chrome is http://www.google.com/chrome/ and clicking the Download Google Chrome button redirects you to download a small 550KB ChromeSetup.exe file. Unfortunately that 550KB file is merely a web installation of Chrome which attempts to download the latest version from Google’s server. There are pros and cons about this, the good thing is it always lets users to download the latest version and the bad thing is it cannot be used as offline installation for networks.
The Chrome web installer will download an approximate 12MB of file to install Chrome and if you have hundreds of computers in a network, you will need to consider the offline version of Chrome installer. The official webpage to download Chrome browser says nothing about where to download the full version of Google Chrome that don’t require an active internet connection to install.
Searching in the Google Help area reveals that Google doesn’t call it an offline or standalone installer but instead a Chrome Alternate Installer. The Chrome Alternate Installer is in fact the full version of standalone installer that can install directly without internet connection. You can download the full version of Chrome from the link below.
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?standalone=1
Setting Gmail As Default MailTo Client for Google Chrome and Internet Explorer
April 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under Email, Google, Internet Explorer
Gmail is one of the most popular email service offered free to anyone in the world with a whopping 7GB and counting of email space plus a very good spam filter. However Google Chrome development team has yet to come out with a built-in configuration to set the default email client. When you see a webpage that has a contact link with a mailto:, you can click on it and nothing will happen. As for Internet Explorer, if you do not have any email client software installed, you will get an error message that says Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not properly installed.
Here is how you can open your Gmail account with either Google Chrome or Internet Explorer when clicking on a mailto hyperlink.
1. Type regedit in the Search Programs and Files bar and hit enter
2. Right click on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, select New > Key and name it as mailto
3. Now right click on mailto, select New > Key and name it as shell
4. Continue right clicking on shell, select New > Key and name it as open
5. Finally right click again on open, select New > Key and name it as command
6. Click on command and at the left pane you should see the name (Default) with the type as REG_SZ. Double click on the (Default) and set the following value date:
To use Internet Explorer to open Gmail when clicking mailto link:
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1
To use Google Chrome to open Gmail when clicking mailto link:
"C:\Users\YOUR USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --app=https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1
This method works only on Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, it only made sense that we posted the 2 registry value data to reflect on IE and Chrome. Users don’t normally use Chrome as their default web browser but wants to open Gmail in Opera when clicking the mailto hyperlink…