Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Interesting Chrome Extensions

Which Chrome extensions do you find useful? Here are some that caught my eye:

• Docs PDF/ PowerPoint Viewer: This one will make Chrome open PDF or PPT links directly in Google Docs. PDF viewing with Google Docs’ preview app works smoother than Adobe’s program, so this comes in handy.
• Empty New Tab Page: When you install this extension, your New Tab page will be empty (this was not previously possible just by setting your home page to about:blank). Neat.
• Slideshow: When you’re on a Google Image search result, there will be a special bar at the bottom of the window. You can expand it to turn the results set into a black background, higher-res viewing type of slideshow. Flickr, Picasa and Facebook are also said to be supported.
• Aviary and Picnik: These take a screenshot of the current webpage and let you edit it in a browser-based app. I like the idea but the devil is in the details, and I wasn’t able to generate a proper simple screenshot for inclusion in a blog post with either app. Overcoming the slowness of the programs, I ran into problems with too-large file sizes due to lack of PNG color compression, as well as strong resizing artefacts for one of the apps.
• AdBlock: Aims to remove advertisements from web pages.
• Google Quick Scroll: Once installed, when you follow through to a target page from Google search, parts of the page relevant to your search may appear in the bottom right corner in a black box. Clicking on the box will immediately scroll-jump to that part of the page.
• Google Translate: Translates the page you’re on when you click on the extension’s button.

Want to create an extension yourself?

Interesting Chrome Extens ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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