Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Don’t you hate it when you have several Chrome tabs open and all of a sudden one of them starts playing a video ad at full volume?
I sure do because those stealthy (and irritating) video ads that pop up out of nowhere are often startling and almost always difficult to track down and pause.
Well, thankfully auto-playing Flash ads are now a thing of the past in Chrome (or at least they soon will be on your machine). [Read more…]
The ability to open a web page in a new browser tab instead of a new window is one of computing’s most popular upgrades of all time.
But there is one annoyance with tabbed browsing that really gets on my nerves, and that’s how new tabs open in the background instead of opening out in front where you can see them without having to first click on the new tab.
Getting Internet Explorer and Firefox to open new tabs immediately is simply a matter of changing a setting. [Read more…]
It has recently come to light that Google’s Chrome web browser (which I LOVE by the way) is a battery hog when used on a laptop, and this is something that I had preciously been totally unaware of.
I hadn’t noticed it because I do the vast majority of my work on a desktop PC, but after checking it out by running tests with my laptop, I can tell you that it is indeed true.
Apparently the culprit is something called the “System Clock Tick Rate”. In simplified terms, this is the rate at which the system “wakes up” a sleeping CPU to check to see if anything is going on that needs to be taken care of. [Read more…]
Question from Keith: Hello Rick. I recently noticed a new icon in the notifications area of my task bar when I use the Chrome web browser. When I hover my mouse over the icon it says “Chrome Notifications”.
I don’t need this icon in my task bar and I want to get rid of it, but I can’t figure out how to do it. Can you help?
Rick’s answer: Keith, you can indeed remove Chrome Notifications from your task bar. Here’s how: [Read more…]
How would you like to be able to see a preview of the web page a link will take you to before you click on it?
Or how about being able to quickly preview the images in online photo galleries just by hovering your mouse over the thumbnails?
A wonderful free Google Chrome extension called SwiftPreview will let you perform both of these tricks!
SwiftPreview is extremely simple and easy to use. Simply install the add-on, then whenever you hover your mouse over a link or thumbnail image, a preview image will be displayed on the screen. If you like what you see, simply click the link or photo and it will open in your browser as usual. If you decide the content being linked to doesn’t interest you, simply remove the mouse from the link or thumbnail and the preview goes away. [Read more…]