google chrome — James Poling

Awesome Screenshot: Screengrab Extension for Chrome

December 24, 2010 By James Poling 1 Comment

As Chrome continues to grab a larger share of the market, many users that are switching over are Firefox users that are finding out just how much they’re dependent on their plugins. A friend of mine was asking tonight whether or not she should make the switch and why. The two most common responses seemed to be:

Yes, Chrome is so much faster, it’s totally worth it.
No, I can’t live without my FF plugins.

For a long time I was in the second category. It wasn’t until Chrome started adding extensions that it become a viable full-time browser for me. So far there hasn’t been one plugin I used regularly on Firefox that I haven’t found a solution for on Chrome that doesn’t do the job just as well, if not better.

Awesome Screenshot is one of those extensions. Screengrab was a Firefox plugin I used reguarly and was often frustrated when I was using Chrome and the only solution I had was to either switch back to FF for the screengrab or take a Windows screenshot and fire up Photshop, neither of which were ideal solutions.

Awesome screenshot not only takes the screenshot you want it also gives you tools to annotate and crop the screenshot as well as upload it to their server to share a quick link or share it on a number of social media platforms. You can, of course, download it and host it yourself just as easily.

If you choose to upload your screenshot you’re presented with a number of other options which you can see here: http://jmsplng.me/enQOu6.

If you’re looking for a screenshot extension for Chrome, I would definitely recommend giving Awesome Screenshot a test drive. I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only did it do what I expected it to do, it did much more than that.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: awesome screenshot, browsers, chrome, chrome extensions, extensions, google chrome, screengrab

Chrome 2 Adds Some Serious Speed and a lot of New Features

May 22, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubd9bqjS64&feature=player_embedded

I’ve had Google Chrome installed since it was still in beta way back in November (it rolled out of Beta in November as well).

From the beginning I’ve said that my two favorite things about Chrome are it’s speed and it’s clean, friendly interface. Even in beta Chrome was by far one of the fastest browsers I had ever used and now, with the release of Chrome 2, it’s even faster and more stable.

One of my early complaints with Chrome was its weak contextual menu. If you’re a blogger and you use Firefox, you’re probably very familiar with the shortcuts your contextual menu provides you. While Chrome is still not quite up to FF standards their new contextual menu is beefed up quite a bit and definitely has many more of the basic necessities.

Surprisingly, one of the most requested changes that Google received about Chrome, and which has actually been addressed in Chrome 2, is the ability to hide the thumbnails on your tabs page. Now you can have all the joy of being able to quickly navigate to some of your most visited sites without all the embarrassment of friends coworkers being able to see that said site is The Hills Gossip Fan Club Blog.

Chrome 2 also features form autofill. This one is pretty much self-explanatory.

Chrome 2 may well work its way up to becoming my default surfing/blogging browser of choice but when it comes to taking care of business, Chrome can’t hold a candle to FF with Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. Those are pretty much essential tools when I’m working on a project, which is practically daily. It’ll be interesting to see if Google even tries to make any headway in that area of FF.

All in all, if you’re not dependent on a lot of Firefox add-ons for your job, Chrome may well be a light, fast and intuitive option for your browsing needs.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: browsers, firefox, google, google chrome, Web Apps

Google Chrome is Out of Beta

December 11, 2008 By James Poling 1 Comment

This has to be some sort of record for Google which usually keeps their products in a perpetual state of beta. Gmail was released over four years ago and it still has the beta tag attached to it. There may, however have been very good reason why Google decided to rush Chrome out of Beta.

Here’s the announcement put on the Google Chrome help blog:

We’ve heard a lot of feedback about product bugs and feature requests and have worked hard to prioritize work on them. We’re excited to announce that with today’s fifteenth release we are taking off the “beta” label!

But why Google, why have you rushed Chrome out of beta?

Google Chrome is not out of beta because it’s ready, but because Google wants to sign some deals with computer manufacturers like Dell that will preinstall the browser. ” The Google’s open source browser has a number of eager customers, including OEMs who can’t offer the browser until it is in full release,” mentions TechCrunch. Even German’s Federal Office for Information Security said that Google’s browser is not for general use because it’s still in beta. If that’s price to increase the adoption, then Google didn’t have to do much: just pretend that Chrome is ready for prime-time.

That’s probably a pretty good assessment of why Chrome got pushed to 1.0 so fast. Still, I’ve been using Chrome for a while and it’s lightening fast with a super clean interface and I’m definitely looking forward to see what improvements Google make to the browser now that it’s officially out of beta and into production.