Firefox and Safari partially support it, Google’s Wave and Chrome projects are banking on it, and most web developers are ecstatic about what it means. It’s HTML5, and if you’re not exactly sure what it is, here’s an explainer.

Image taken from Bruce Lawson’s fantastic HTML5 presentation.

What is HTML5? Some kind of really fancy link tag?

HTML5 is a specification for how the web’s core language, HTML, should be formatted and utilized to deliver text, images, multimedia, web apps, search forms, and anything else you see in your browser. In some ways, it’s mostly a core set of standards that only web developers really need to know. In other ways, it’s a major revision to how the web is put together. Not every web site will use it, but those that do will have better support across modern desktop and mobile browsers (that is, everything except Internet Explorer).

What Awesomeness can I expect from HTML5?

The big, marquee changes in HTML5 have already made some headlines, thanks to browser makers like Google, Apple, Mozilla, and others picking them up and implementing them. The shortlist:

• Offline storage: Kind of like "Super Cookies," but with much more space to store both one-time data and persistent app databases, like email. Actually, you can think of offline storage as something a lot like Google Gears—you just won't need to install a plug-in to reap the benefits.
• Canvas drawing: Sites can mark off a space on a page where interactive pictures, charts and graphs, game components, and whatever else imagination allows can be drawn directly by programming code and user interaction—no Flash or other plug-ins required.
• Native video and audio streaming support: It’s in the very early stages and subject to format disruption, but sites like YouTube and Pandora could one day skip Flash entirely to bring you streaming audio and video, with timed playback and other neat features.
• Geolocation: Just what it sounds like, but not limited to a single provider’s API or browser tool. HTML5 can find your location and use it to tailor things like search results, tag your Twitter updates, and more. Location-aware devices are a big deal.
• Smarter forms: Search boxes, text inputs, and other you-type-here fields get better controls for focusing, validating data, interacting with other page elements, sending through email, and more. It may not sound that sexy, but it could mean less annoyance as a user, and that’s always a good thing.
• Web application focus: Without breaking down the hundreds of nuts and bolts, it’s fair to say that HTML5 is aimed at making it easier to build wikis, drag-and-drop tools, discussion boards, real-time chat, search front-ends, and other modern web elements into any site, and have them work the same across browsers.

Where can I see HTML5 in action?

Ooh, good question!

From this page right here, with a soon-to-be-optional-maybe-Flash, you can check out these video demonstrations:

Google I/O 2009 Keynote, pt. 1

Firefox 3.5 Treats Videos Like Web Pages:

If you're running an up-to-date version of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera—or, basically, any regularly updated browser besides Internet Explorer—give these links a shot.

HTML5 Demos: Huge list of capability demonstrations, gracefully compiled by Remy Sharp.

Welcome to Safari: Written entirely with HTML5 and CSS 3.

YouTube in HTML5: No Flash required at all (for Chrome and Safari only, at this point).

Canvas drawing and audio

Neat interactive site that shows tweets from folks who are digging on HTML5, with streaming background audio and interactive data pieces.

Why is it being pushed? Don’t Flash and JavaScript already work?

Make no mistake, HTML5 has much love for JavaScript and its many relatives—in fact, the new markup standards make it easier for JavaScript-type code to point at, and pull from, pieces of each web page. As for Flash, and Silverlight, and other browser plug-ins, well, they are artificial solutions for a natural problem that HTML5 is trying to fix: Placing and managing interactive elements on a web page.

Besides being a major source of browser memory leaks and crashes, Flash and its brethren also doesn’t work on every platform, and has to be re-written and adapted for every new one. If you’re looking to make a clever application available to as many people as possible, a write once, use everywhere system is ideal. When more browsers and developers support HTML5's audio, video, and interaction standards, the idea of the web as the universal app store—for smartphones, for desktops and laptops, Windows, Mac, and Linux—gets closer to reality.

Apple tried to pitch this mentality to developers with their first iPhone release. That pronouncement was, to put it mildly, roundly mocked. Since then, webapps have become a lot more powerful and respectable as mainstays of productivity, and enthusiasm for the walled garden model of application markets has waned quite a bit in the minds of an increasing number of developers.

That’s not to say that HTML5-powered web applications, with their lack of serious local storage, hardware access, and serious offline capabilities, are going to make the iPhone App Store, the Android Market, or the desktop software we’re all used to obsolete. But look at how Chrome is positioning its Chrome OS for netbooks, which relies on HTML5 for offline storage: A secondary computer, in terms of hard-and-fast capabilities, but one you might use just as often, if not more, for the web-connected convenience.

How will HTML5 makes its way onto my web?

HTML5 isn’t a software release, or a web development law. It’s a voted-upon and group-edited standard, written in broad fashion to accommodate different styles of development and the different thinking among web browser makers.

Put more simply, it depends on what you’re using to surf. And what standards your web makers are following.

Firefox, Safari, and Chrome on the desktop support a few of the styles and features outlined in HTML5′s draft specifications, like offline storage, canvas drawing, and, most intriguingly, tags for audio and video that allow sites to stream multimedia files directly into a browser. Apple’s Safari for iPhone and the Android browser also support elements of HTML5, as does Opera Mobile. Want to know the nitty-gritty of where your browser stands on HTML5? Web geeks have put in the time to put it all in a Wikipedia chart.

Those audio and video tags aren't quite as liberating as they may seem. The writers of the HTML5 standard—Ian Hickson of Google and Davd Hyatt of Apple—wanted to define a single, standardized format for video streaming, but while their employers favor the H.264/MPEG-4 standard, open-source firms like Mozilla can’t abide by its patent “encumbrance,” and Opera and other web firms don’t particularly love the licensing costs. Their alternative is Theora, better known (relatively) as Ogg Theora. As it stands, HTML5 simply doesn’t require or suggest a single container format or codec to use, which could mean browser-by-browser differences down the road. Ars Technica has a good explainer on the HTML5 video codec debate.

Further reading

• HTML5 – Wikipedia: Because, seriously, where else would you start?
• HTML5: The editor’s draft of the whole darned standard.
• Dive Into HTML5: Programmer, and explainer of all things programming, details what’s different about HTML5 in an ongoing work.
• HTML5 Supersedes Web Forms 2.0: A good read on what changes with web forms in HTML5, which I’m not quite developer-y enough to concisely explain.
• The Future of HTML 5 by Bruce Lawson: Funny, digestible bigger-picture take on what HTML5 really means for the web.

---

If you’re already savvy with HTML5, what differences or improvements would you point out that we left out? Tell us what HTML5 means to you, and your browser, in the comments.

Filed under: Things I found in the Interwebs, Video by Jeremiah | No Comments »
Source: Lifehacker

This week we met Motorola’s Droid, the first handset with Android 2.0. To an outsider, it just looks like another Google smartphone, but 2.0 is more than that: it’s proof that Android is finally going to take over the world.

So Wait, What Is Android, Exactly?

In Google’s words, it’s “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” That doesn’t mean much, so here’s a breakdown: It’s a Linux-based, open-source mobile OS, complete with a custom window manager, modified Linux 2.6 kernel, WebKit-based browser and built-in camera, calendar, messaging, dialer, calculator, media player and album apps. If that sounds a little sparse, that’s because it is: Android on its own doesn’t amount to a whole lot; in fact, a phone with plain vanilla Android wouldn’t feel like a smartphone at all. Thankfully, these phones don’t exist.

Android is Linux insofar as its core components are open-source and free, and Google must publish their source code with every release. But the real heart of the Android phone experience—the Google apps like Maps, GChat, Gmail, Android Market, Google Voice, Places and YouTube are closed-source, meaning Google owns them outright. Every Google phone comes with these apps in one form or another so to the user this distinction isn’t that important. That said, it occasionally rears its head, like when Android modder Cyanogen had to strip the apps out of his custom Android builds to avoid getting sued by Google:

The issue that’s raised is the redistribution of Google’s proprietary applications like Maps, GTalk, Market, and YouTube. They are Google’s intellectual property and I intend to respect that. I will no longer be distributing these applications as part of CyanogenMod.

This can lead to more mainstream (and confusing) issues, like with the, erm, touchy (sorry!) multitouch issue: Android OS supports multitouch, in that it can recognize multiple simultaneous input points on its screen. But Google’s Android apps don’t. So when a company like HTC comes along and decides to properly add multitiouch to the OS, they can only add it to the open-source parts, like the browser (or their own closed-source apps), not Google’s proprietary apps. That’s why the Hero has pinch-zoom in its browser and photo albums but not in Google Maps, where it’s just as at home.

The issue gets even less trivial as the apps grow more central to the Android experience. You know how Google Maps Navigation was, like, the banner feature for Android 2.0? Well, it was, but technically speaking, it’s not a part of Android. It’s just part of an app made by Google for Android, and that’ll ship with most Android handsets. Except for in countries where Google doesn’t have their mapping data quite together enough, where it won’t. That’s what’s happening with the Euro Droid, which, by the way, does have multitouch in its browser, like the Hero. That’s why the distinction matters.

So, why take so much care to set up and protect this open source component, when surely Google could just slap together a closed-source mobile operating system and give it away for free, right? It would deprive handset manufacturers of their ability to freely modify certain core components of the OS, sure, but the real reasoning, oddly enough, has less to do with phones and more to do with, well, everything else.

How We Got Here

Flash back to November 7th, 2007, when the Open Handset Alliance, a massive coalition of mobile industry companies, held hands to announce to the world their new child. His name was Android, and we were told very little about him. What we were told, though, was delivered almost entirely in frustratingly vague platitudes:

Handset manufacturers and wireless operators will be free to customize Android in order to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. Developers will have complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and user-friendly services, bringing the Internet developer model to the mobile space.

We were a little disappointed that the GPhone wasn’t strictly a phone, but like most people, this sounded exciting to us. Vague, but exciting.

And so we waited, patiently. And waited. Then, nearly a year later, we got our hands on the first hardware to actually use Android. It was called the T-Mobile G1, and It Was Good. Then, six months later, we got another phone—the Magic, or MyTouch, which was more or less exactly like the first one, minus a keyboard. It wasn't until two full years since Android's first appearance—when not just HTC but Motorola, Samsung and Sony started showing off fresh wares—that Android began to feel like more than an experiment. And more important than getting fresh hardware, Android's OS had changed too. A lot.

The T-Mobile G1 shipped with Android 1.0, which wasn’t exactly missing much, but still felt a bit barebones. We had to wait until February of 2009 for paid apps to show up in the Android Market, after which April saw the first major update, Android 1.5 “Cupcake.” (Updates each have alphabetical, pastry-themed codenames.) This was followed by 1.6 “Donut,” which most new handsets are shipping with now, then 2.0 (yes, “Eclair”), which throws in social networking integration, an interface lift, support for new device resolutions, a fresh developer SDK and support for the optional Google Maps Navigation. This version is currently only found on the Motorola Droid, but should start showing up elsewhere with a few months. And so here we are. And that’s just half of it.

Android Isn’t Just a Phone OS

That announcement I showed you earlier? That was from the Open Handset alliance, a consortium of phone folks—handsets manufacturers, mobile chip makers and the like. But let's look back at another announcement, from the Android project leads, back in early 2008:

Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications…Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.

Almost all the talk about Android over the last two years has been about Android the phone OS, not Android the lightweight Linux distribution. While Google was busy pumping out high-profile phone-centric updates, Android was starting to creep into other industries, like a disease. A good disease, that everyone likes! Yes, one of those. This is where things get weird.

Remember all those not-quite-there Android netbooks? Part of the plan. The Android-powered Barnes & Noble Nook? Shouldn’t have been a surprise. Android navigators? Why not? PMPs? Creative’s got one. Photo frames and set-top boxes? Already in the works.

Most of these devices won't look like Android hardware to us, because our strongest Android associations with the OS are all visual and phone-specific, like the homescreen, app drawer and dialer. Nonetheless, this is as much a part of the Android vision as phones are—it just won't be as obvious.

Your Android-powered DVR won’t have an app drawer, but it will share the kernel, and an unusually good widget system. Your Android-powered PMP may run a custom interface, but it’ll have access to thousands of apps, like an open-source iPod Touch. Your Android-powered photo frame might look just like any other photo frame, but when it drops your wireless connection, it’ll have a decent, full-featured settings screen to help you pick it back up. And over-the-air updates. And it might actually cost a few dollars less that it would have otherwise, because remember, Android is free. This is our Android future, and it sounds awesome.

What Happens Next

But the first step in the Android takeover is necessarily the phones. Android 2.0 means the handsets aren’t just interesting anymore; they’re truly buyable. As Matt said this week:

In time, Android very well could be the internet phone, hands down, in terms of raw capabilities…. Android 2.0′s potential finally feels as enormous as the iPhone’s, and I get kinda tingly thinking about it.

What problems the phones still have—among them, poor media playback and the lack of a bundled desktop client to manage media—are not with Android but with Google, which is really just a major supporter of Android. Either Google will solve them hands-on, or the dream of the open source and app developer communities rising up to fill in all the gaps will become a reality. What's certain is that Google—or someone—needs to address them if future legions of Google-branded phones are to succeed to their full potential.

Speaking of potential, it’s massive. In addition to everything else Android has going on, timing is on its side. Windows Mobile is limping along with two broken legs, and its hardware partners took (or maybe gave) notice: Motorola, lately a pariah in its own right, doesn’t want anything more to do with Microsoft; HTC is stating continued support while quietly phasing out the WinMo ranks; Sony Ericsson, which hasn’t seen a true hit come from one of their Microsoft-branded phones in years, is dabbling in Androidery. And as far as most consumers are concerned, anything Windows Mobile can do, Android can do better.

It doesn’t stop with Microsoft, either. Symbian, whose boss called Android “just another Linux platform,” is losing ground, and losing some of Sony Ericsson’s business doesn’t help. The Palm Pre, polished and beautiful as it is, can’t keep up with Android’s exploding app inventory, multiplying hardware partners and rock-star ability to draw talent. RIM’s BlackBerry isn’t generally seen as a direct Android competitor, but Android 2.0, along with Palm’s WebOS and Apple’s iPhone OS, are the main reasons the BlackBerry OS feels so clunky and old. That matters. From here, the outlook is clear: Android and the iPhone are the next consumer smartphone superpowers.

And even if it takes Google 10 years to iron out Android’s faults and push this kind of adoption, you can expect Android, or its unofficial pseudonym “Google Phone,” to become a household name. Besides, Android will start creeping into our lives in places we might not expect it. It’ll power our settop boxes, ebook readers, PMPs and who knows what else. It’s not just going to be the next great smartphone OS, it’ll be the quiet, invisible software layer that sits between all our portable gadgets and our fingers.

Source photo courtesy of NASA

Still something you wanna know? Still mixing up your Androids and your hemorrhoids? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints here, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Filed under: Things I found in the Interwebs by Jeremiah | No Comments »
Source: Gizmodo: android

Learning a second language is a somewhat generalized practice. Think about it. If someone close to you began to learn French, Polish, Russian, Chinese or Arabic you’d be convinced they would fail (although you might not tell them that!). That’s because learning a second language in an environment where you’re not immersed in it 24/7 throws up barrier after barrier. That’s why many language students go abroad for a year.

The only other strategy that you have when you’re at home is to buy a few text books, a pocket-sized dictionary and begin wading through a river of despair and hopelessness. Or is it the only other strategy?

Recently I resumed learning French. I was never any good at it in school – mostly because the above strategy was applied. But only a few months into my new endeavour, I’m currently halfway through a classic French novel called ‘La Guerre des Boutons’. How? I took the geeky way out i.e. I immersed myself in an environment filled with French – it’s called the Internet (you may have heard about it). Here are my top three tips to help you with learning a second language online.

Using Popular Websites in That Language

Allow me to explain this one. I don’t mean use every single website in French/Spanish/ Polish etc. What I do mean is to use large sites in the foreign language you’re trying to learn. Make a list of the five largest websites you use regularly. I’m willing to bet that Google is in there. EBay is likely to have made the cut. Maybe even Amazon? Basically just jot down your favourite sites and start using them in a foreign language. The reason I’m telling you to do this is not to have you utterly confused but to teach you.

You see, these large websites generally use simple sentences and popular words. Take EBay; it doesn’t have many long rambling paragraphs, rather just plain words and phrases. All of the different categories will undoubtedly be useful words and what’s more they’re often associated with pictures. You can also get a bargain on expensive products on native language sites where demand is lower.

Using sites such as Google and Yahoo can give you some more basic words as well as seeing some of the French news headlines. This is not an intensive way of learning a language. In fact, it’s fairly passive and doesn’t require too much effort.

Word a Day Tweet

Twitter has escalated in popularity over the last year or so and it’s the perfect platform for a Word a Day regime. You probably tweet multiple times a day (and if not, where have you been for the past year?) so why not make a few of those tweets count for something.

By following this service in the particular language you’re learning, you’ll be tweeted a word which you must use in a logical sentence in one of your own tweets that day. Again, this is a passive way of learning a language. By fitting it into your already existing routine you’re not climbing a whole new mountain.

BBC Languages

Part of the BBC’s website is devoted to teaching people how to speak different languages. This section is packed with interesting ways of learning a language rather than learning off boring verb sheets.

For example, they have videos of people in everyday situations such as in meeting people, dining in restaurants, going to bars, at work etc. These videos are accompanied by a transcript so you can read through the words and understand it fully.

There are are different difficulty settings depending on whether you’re starting fresh or have been learning the language for some time.

If you combine the BBC language course with the two passive learning methods above you’ll be on your way to speaking fluently in no time.

It also wouldn’t hurt to subscribe to a few blogs in your chosen language. See my post here on MUO about Reading Blogs On Your Cellphone With A Java RSS Reader. Also, you might want to check out Angie’s post if you’re looking for online resources to learn foreign languages: 18 Great Sites to Learn a New Language.

What’s your method of learning a new language. Do you have any self-taught tricks?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

Related posts

• Learn A New Language With Anki’s Flash Card System (8)
• 18 Great Sites to Learn a New Language (76)
• Students: Free Apps To Help You Excel at School [Mac only] (29)
• ESL Tools for Better Writing in English as a Second Language (17)
• What Language Is This? 5 Tools to Identify Unknown Languages (22)

Filed under: Things I found in the Interwebs by Jeremiah | No Comments »
Source: MakeUseOf.com

Google Chrome has come a long way in the past year, steadily adding subtle but useful features for power users. Let's take a fresh look at Chrome's current offerings—especially for those willing to brave its early developer builds.

Not long after Chrome’s release, our 2008 Chrome Power User’s Guide covered its best features for savvy surfers, such as keyboard shortcuts and startup switches. We won’t rehash those here; instead we’re going to round up the new stuff that’s come out since in both the stable and developer build of Chrome. (For reference, as of writing, the stable build of Google Chrome is version number 3.0.195.27, and the developer release is version 4.0.222.12.)

Turn Chrome into a Site-Specific Browser with Application Shortcuts

If webapps like Gmail have replaced desktop apps like an old-school email client for you, you’ll like Chrome’s ability to act as a site-specific browser (SSB) with Application Shortcuts. Chrome’s minimal interface makes it a great candidate to get the heck out of your webapps’ way, and just act as a window to it. To put a Chrome Application Shortcut to Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, or any other webapp you like to keep open in a separate window, open the site in Chrome. From the Page menu, choose “Create application shortcuts.” From there decide to put your shortcut on the desktop, quick launch bar, and/or Start Menu. You can create as many Application Shortcuts as you like to all your favorite webapps or sites. When you open your webapp from the Application Shortcut icon, you won’t see Chrome’s address bar, or tabs, or your bookmarks bar. Any link that you click inside the application window will open in a different window in a full-on instance of Chrome.

Assign Keywords to Your Search Engines

One of Chrome’s most touted features is how you can search the web by just typing into its address bar (a.k.a, the “omnibox”). To search specific sites, you can even type certain domain names (like “youtube.com”) and then press Tab to search that site specifically. However, power users want to configure custom searches to happen in as few keystrokes as possible. Like Firefox’s keyword bookmark capabilities, you can assign a keyword to a search engine bookmark in Chrome, which uses the %s variable to pass parameters to the URL.

To do so, right-click in Chrome’s address bar and choose “Edit Search Engines.” There, you can add, edit, or remove searches and assign keywords in the Keyword field.

Using this technique you can, for instance, update Twitter with a keyword as well as search Lifehacker.com via Google. (Set the URL to http://google.com/search?q=site:lifehacker.com+%s and the keyword to lh. Then, to search Lifehacker’s archives in Chrome, type lh "your search here" into the address bar.)

Customize the “New Tab” Page

Chrome’s other slick headliner feature is its “New Tab” page, which displays a grid of frequently-visited web site thumbnails that help you get to where you’re most likely to go when you create a new tab. That list is more customizable than ever, with options to rearrange the thumbnails (just drag and drop) and pin thumbnails to specific locations on the grid (hover over a thumbnail and press the thumbtack button to do so). If you don’t need so much eye candy, you can switch to a list view by clicking on the view buttons on the upper right.

Get to Know New Chrome Startup Switches

Last year we covered several Chrome startup switches that let you do things like use multiple user profiles, always start Chrome in a maximized window, and disable certain features like Flash or JavaScript. Today there are three more startup switches worth mentioning. The --bookmark-menu switch adds a bookmark button to Chrome’s toolbar. The -incognito switch starts up Google Chrome in private, incognito mode. Finally, Greasemonkey fans will want to try the --enable-user-scripts switch to see if their favorite scripts work in Chrome. (A few other steps are required; here’s how to get Greasemonkey user scripts going.)

Choose Your Chrome Theme

As if ad-heavy web sites weren't enough, web browser themes can add even more visual distractions to your surfing experience. However, since Chrome's—well, chrome—is so minimal, its themes are less annoying than in other browsers. I prefer Google’s more muted in-house themes, but there are more vibrant artist themes as well. To activate a theme, from the Wrench menu, choose Personal Options, click “Get Themes.” Choose the theme you like from the Themes Gallery and click the “Apply Theme” button under it.

Master Mouse and Keyboard Shortcuts for Managing Tabs

Every power user has a few essential keyboard shortcuts in their arsenal, and Chrome offers some mouse-and-keyboard combinations for managing tabs, too. Like Firefox, you can middle-mouse-button click any link to open it in a background tab (or Ctrl+click for the same result). Shift+Click opens a link in a new window, Shift+middle+click (or Shift+Ctrl+click) opens a link in a new tab and switches to it, and Alt+click saves the contents of a link to your computer.

Switch to the Dev Channel Release for Extensions (and More)

Brave devotees to Google Chrome want to take advantage of its open development, and subscribe to the developer channel of early Chrome releases to get a preview of new features. Using Chrome’s Channel Changer tool you can switch from the stable release to the no-guarantees-on-stability beta or developer build. The risk you take in running into unexpected bugs is worth it for features the early builds offer. In the current Developer build version 4.0.222.12, you can sync your bookmarks, test extensions, and pin tabs. (Also, Mac and Linux users can finally try out Chrome via the developer channel, as a stable release is not yet available.)

(Dev Build Only) Synchronize Your Bookmarks

You use Chrome at home and at the office, and you want your bookmarks synced in both places, In the dev build of Chrome, from the Wrench menu, choose “Sync my bookmarks” to save your Chrome bookmarks in your Google account. (You’ll have to sign in to start syncing.) If you’re already using the Xmarks extension for Firefox or IE, you can use that in the dev build of Chrome, which includes the foundation of extension support with a few alpha add-ons ready for testing.

(Dev Build Only) Install Extensions

Chrome’s extension support is still young, but several alpha/beta extensions give you a glimpse of Firefox-like extension goodness in Chrome. Here are a few of our favorite Chrome extensions.

• Gmail Checker: While it doesn’t appear to work for Google Apps accounts (someone? prove me wrong?), the Gmail checker puts the number of unread messages in your inbox on Chrome’s bottom toolbar.
• Xmarks: Our favorite bookmark syncing extension for Firefox and IE is available for Chrome dev build testers as an alpha version. You must sign into Xmarks and sign up for the alpha test to get the Chrome extension.
• AdSweep and Adblock+: Scrub annoying flashing ads from your favorite web sites.
• Session Saver: As previously covered, this extension enables multi-tab saving and reloading.
• WOT: Integrates web site reputation ratings a la Web of Trust into Google Chrome.
• LastPass: Adds deeper auto-fill password management to Chrome.

To view and manage what extensions you’ve got installed in Google Chrome, from the Wrench menu, choose Extensions to open the Extensions manager, where you can reload, disable, and uninstall extensions.

(Dev Build Only) Shrink and Affix Tabs with “Pin Tab” Option

Finally, a tiny little tab feature that everyone seems to love is available in the dev build of Chrome: the ability to shrink a tab down to only its favicon, and pin it to your tab bar. Right-click on any tab and choose “Pin tab” from the context menu to try it out.

What other power tips for Chrome, stable or developer build, are out there? Share your best ones in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, strongly suspects 2010 will be a big year for Google Chrome. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Filed under: Things I found in the Interwebs by Jeremiah | No Comments »
Source: Lifehacker