One of the big drawbacks that has prevented me from changing from Firefox to the lightning fast Chrome browser has been the lack of extensions that help keep my on-line life more organised, faster and easier. An earlier post highlighted potential problems at Mozilla and just this morning as Firefox opened itself up it told me there were vital updates to solve security issues. Now I know my ageing memory is getting more than a fraction shot and that senior moments are becoming senior minutes and will, no doubt, eventually become senior hours, but wasn’t Firefox supposed to be the ultimate in on-line security over the hacker target Internet Explorer?
When it was announced that Chrome could cope with extensions I started to have a sniff around and see what was on offer. As you would expect the offerings range from the sublime to the ridiculous, ie an extension that will tell you the weather (personally I find looking out the window quite sufficient and since the attractive BBC weather lady told me just yesterday that I was going to freeze my ass off for another week this extension is pretty superfluous!) to some of the more useful bolt on goodies that we geeks love.
First to be installed was Xmarks – it used to be Foxmarks – which keeps all my bookmarked pages safe and sound. As I flick between Firefox and Chrome if I add a new bookmark in one browser it will update it in the other and as and when I get around to buying a netbook, it will keep them in sync there, too.
Next was Evernote, probably one of the best webclipping tools around and one I still return too despite reviewed a few of the alternatives that are out there. I am not saying the others are not any good, they are and some perform better than Evernote but for me the Big E suits my way of working.
In the absence of as Google Toolbar for Google Chrome (just how stark raving mad is that) I have separate extensions to track RSS feeds through Google Reader, Google Wave and Gmail – even though the latter is 95 per cent of the time handled via Thunderbird. There’s a Google Calendar bolt on that tells me how long I have until the next event. There are also a button that takes me to Zoho Docs and, finally, WOT, Web Of Trust) a service that monitors the security levels of sites and warns me if I am entering one that will strip me of my on-line identity and start posting Tweets about necrophilia and bestiality; if tweets start appearing about flogging a dead horse, it isn’t me, honest!
And that is it so far, but that is just after the first week or seeking out the wheat from the chaff and I have no doubt that others will be added as I wean myself away from Firefox to Chrome.
Using Chrome? Let us know what your favourite extensions are.
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