extensions

The Internet is a pretty great resource for work or school, but it can also be an enormous distraction. timeStats is an extension for Google Chrome that allows you to see how you spend your online time. A few clicks will get you a chart distribution of your Internet activity; a couple more, and you can get even more detailed reports. The reports break down your daily/weekly/monthly activities with awesome pie charts and bar graphs showing what you did on which day. It can also show you other details such as the sites, domain zones, and time spent … Read more

Send to Kindle for Firefox is an extension by Amazon that allows you to send Web content to your Kindle. Previously only available for Chrome, it's a nice way to queue up long Web articles for offline reading. It also formats the content for easier reading, sans ads, menus, and other distractions. Here's how to use Send to Kindle for Firefox.

After you've installed Send to Kindle for Firefox, the Kindle button will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the Firefox toolbar. Left-click on it to bring up the options box.

The "Send to Kindle&… Read more

If you are like me and spend the majority of the workday online, then you likely reach a point each day where you become overwhelmed by the number of open browser tabs, with dozens upon dozens opened as one bit of research spawned various other searches in any number of direction.

I recently discovered two Chrome extensions that help you manage this tab overload. One -- Tab Scissors -- lets you split a group of tabs into two windows, while the other -- Tab Glue -- glues all of your tabs back into one window.

Both extensions could not be … Read more

The Internet is full of interesting things. Because of this, it's likely that you bookmark Web sites so you can easily find them later. Unfortunately, if you bookmark too many, it can be easy to lose track of each one.

If you're a Chrome user, Bookmarks Tagger has your bookmark organization needs covered. With this extension you can add tags to each bookmark making it easier to find. Using tags is a more efficient way to locate what you're looking for, especially in the case of Web sites having names that are long or unrelated to their … Read more

Isn't it annoying when you load a Web page and audio starts playing without warning? Usually it's a background music track or an advertisement video, but it always seems to happen at the worst time: when your volume is the loudest. Maybe you just finished watching a movie on Netflix with a lot of whispering and suddenly your ears are being assaulted by loud noises.

Instead of policing your volume levels before each Web browsing session, why not just disable those plug-ins from loading content unless you say it's OK? Here's how to disable plug-ins from … Read more

Internet users can now better manage their privacy settings across the Web, courtesy of a new browser extension.

Released just yesterday, PrivacyFix supports Firefox and Google Chrome. The extension can automatically check your privacy settings across specific Web sites, including Facebook and Google. It then displays and explains your settings, giving you the opportunity to manage them directly.

After you install PrivacyFix, a window pops up in your browser showing you the default settings for Facebook to start. Can non-friends see your posts? Is Facebook sharing your profile with other sites? Is your name being used to "like" … Read more

There are so many easy ways to download streaming media these days that we find absolutely no reason to bother with a program that's the least bit complicated. For that reason, we recommend that users who want to download video and music from streaming sites (where that's permitted, of course) look for something other than Faster Downloader to do it with. This unintuitive program left us scratching our head and wondering why the creators had so needlessly complicated what should be a simple process.

Faster Downloader boasts that it's "fully integrated" with Firefox and Internet … Read more

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that's especially true when it comes to spyware; wouldn't you rather protect your system than spend hours trying to rid it of malicious visitors? SpywareBlaster is a simple program that provides protection from ActiveX-based software and unwanted cookies for both Firefox and Internet Explorer users.

SpywareBlaster has a simple interface that will be easy for even novices to navigate. The main screen shows the protection status for Internet Explorer, restricted Web sites, and Firefox. By default, protection is disabled for each of these, but you can easily … Read more

Accessing Chrome's privacy settings normally requires you to click on the wrench icon, select Settings, click on Advanced Settings, then scrolling down to see the privacy options. A quicker and easier way to manage your privacy settings is by using Privacy Manager.

Privacy Manager is a Chrome extension that puts all of Chrome's privacy settings on a single screen. Just click on the toolbar icon to see them. It also includes some of Chrome's experimental settings, that you can normally only get to by typing "chrome://flags" in the omnibox (address bar).

Keep in mind … Read more