However, the developers of all those browsers haven’t been very active (or successful) in one type of improvement that could potentially bring some massive results: going from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Why 64-bit?

Why is going from 32-bit to 64-bit an important step? Virtually all computers that you can find today are capable of running 64-bit operating systems. 64-bit operating systems enable you to use more than 3.25 GB of RAM, and increase the performance of your system in certain cases.

Memory management is also improved in 64-bit systems. In order to make use of this 64-bit capability, not only does the operating system need to be compiled for 64-bit machines, but the individual applications need to be as well. While 64-bit operating systems are capable of running 32-bit software (this is mainly the case for Windows; on other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux, it’s also possible but highly frowned upon), you won’t get the benefits that 64-bit software would provide.

The Windows 64-bit Situation

On Windows, there are no official 64-bit builds of any browser except Internet Explorer. Even then, IE is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors in order to be more compatible with plugins, which back then were primarily 32-bit only. However, the major plugins are now available in the 64-bit flavor, so browsers now have some motivation to crank out some 64-bit builds of their own. This seems to be taking a while though with a number of hurdles to overcome.

Firefox has finally come out with a 64-bit nightly, but it’s nowhere near ready to be called stable. Instead, the developers of the Waterfox project have been working hard to get an unofficial build of 64-bit Firefox out and making it fast. While Waterfox began as an unofficial project, Mozilla is now supporting it and may start incorporating it sometime in the future to release official, stable builds of 64-bit Firefox.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Waterfox beats Chrome in the SunSpider benchmark, whereas Chrome usually beats regular Firefox.

Downloading and Installing

Getting and installing Waterfox is just as easy as with Firefox. Simply head over to their website’s download page, and scroll a little down to get the latest version. The page also states that you need to have the Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) installed, but this is not an issue for Windows 7 64-bit users, but rather for those on previous Windows 64-bit versions. Additionally, the page lists links to the 64-bit version of the most common plugins so that you can have a smooth Web experience with your new 64-bit browser.

Easy Transition

Waterfox is also very helpful when transitioning from regular Firefox because it uses the same Firefox profile as the 32-bit flavor. Therefore, any passwords, history, preferences, and add-ons that have been installed in regular Firefox will be instantly available upon first launch of Waterfox. As that implies, all add-ons made for regular Firefox also work 100% in Waterfox. The amount of work necessary to switch to the 64-bit Firefox browser is pretty minimal. To review, all you need to do is the following:

• Install Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) if necessary
• Install 64-bit version of plugins if not already done
• Install Waterfox

Conclusion

Waterfox really is a great browser, making the Firefox we all know (and some of us love) a little faster and happier in its 64-bit environment. Mac OS X and Linux users don’t need to be too jealous that Waterfox is a Windows-only project, as those two operating systems have had official 64-bit builds of all major browsers for a relatively long amount of time.

What do you think about this project? Is there something you’d like to add about 64-bit systems? Let us know in the comments!

Installing Chrome extensions is easy as a click and you don’t even have to hold your breath. But we shouldn’t forget that extensions are little programs that feed off our computer’s resources. And some can be real resource hogs. Also, too many extensions create a clutter that’s not so aesthetic when you want some clean real estate on your browser. Not surprisingly, the answer lies in another extension that manages its brethren with a remarkable discipline, and thus makes for a better browsing experience.

Say hello to Context, a Chrome extension that I consider to be a must-have in your army of Chrome extensions.

Create Chrome Extension Groups and Manage Them Better

Context organizes your extensions into ‘contextual’ groups. That is to say, if you are listening to music or watching movies, Context allows you to load only the extensions that relate to that. The remaining ones can be kept hidden. Here’s how you go about creating a few extension groupings using Context.

1. After installing Context, a brief tutorial shows how you can set up Context.

2. Go into the Options for the extension to set up your first group. Context neatly lists all the extensions that you have installed. You can also check the advanced options (as in the screenshot) to also include apps. Click on New Context.

3. Name the group and choose from the available icons.

4. Creating a Context group is as easy as dragging the extension tile into the grouping. Drag the extensions from the list above to the Context group below to populate the relevant group. You can drag the same extension to all groups if you want to include it in more than one group. You can click on the cross icon if you go wrong. You can change the order of the extensions within a group. You can also drag the groups to change the order of preference as it would appear in the Context dropdown. Click on the Save button.

5. The Context icon itself appears as a white jigsaw piece on the Chrome toolbar. Click on the icon to reveal the dropdown. You can click on one group to load extensions belonging to that while hiding all the rest. Clicking on All extensions brings back the entire lineup of course.

6. When a new extension is installed Context brings up a small notification pop-up that lets you you assign it to appropriate groups via the notification window. You do not need to open the configuration page.

Switch between Extensions and Boost up Your Browsing

Context is not only for de-cluttering your browser toolbar by hiding extensions you do not need immediately. By loading only those extensions that you need right now, Context also frees up memory which otherwise would have been utilized by all the extensions you have installed.

Consider these two screenshots for a comparison:

Context and its one-click switching is a productivity booster. Do you think it can be a claimant to a tiny corner of the Best Chrome Extensions to have in your browser? What do you think?

User Agent Switcher is simple, yet powerful. It adds a toolbar button that you can use to toggle between different user agent strings. User Agent Switcher overrides Firefox’s default user agent, tricking websites into thinking you’re using a different browser.

What’s a User Agent?

Your browser sends its user agent, which contains the browser’s version and operating system, whenever you connect to a website. Websites can detect the browser you’re using and serve different content — this is why iPhone and Android users see special mobile websites when they browse the web.

Getting Started

Like most Firefox add-ons, User Agent Switcher is available in Firefox’s add-ons gallery. After it’s installed, you can right-click your toolbar, select Customize and put the User Agent Switcher button anywhere you like.

Crash Internet Explorer’s Party

It’s happened to all of us, although it happens less often these days. You click a link expecting to see a web page, but you’re locked out. “This website requires Internet Explorer,” it says. Does it really require Internet Explorer? Not usually. With the User Agent Switcher extension, you can disguise Firefox as Internet Explorer and slip right in.

Here’s a website from the IE-only hall of shame:

Yuck. Let’s click the User Agent Switcher menu and pretend to be Internet Explorer.

Now we can slip right in. As far as the website is concerned, we’re using Internet Explorer.

Remember to switch your user agent back after you’re done. You wouldn’t want to inflate Internet Explorer’s usage statistics by pretending to be IE everywhere, would you?

This won’t help if the website really is IE-only. Websites that use ActiveX controls are out; those only run in Internet Explorer. Try the IE Tab extension if you encounter one of those sites — IE Tab runs Internet Explorer itself in a Firefox tab.

Explore the Mobile Web

Select the iPhone user agent and you’ll appear as a mobile device. Websites won’t always function like they would on a real iPhone, but you’ll still see the mobile version of the website.

Here we have YouTube’s mobile site running on our “iPhone”:

And here’s Gmail on our makeshift iPhone:

This is a convenient way to test mobile websites, although you’ll still have to test them on a real device. If you have a mobile device, you can do the reverse and see full versions of websites in the palm of your hand.

See What Google Sees

Sometimes a website wants to force you to create an account. You’ll click a link, even from Google, and see a sign-in or registration page.

These websites don’t want to hide their content from Google, so they often allow full access to Google’s web crawler. You can select the Googlebot user agent string and Firefox will put on its best Google disguise.

It’s possible for a website to say “Hey, look at your IP address — you’re not really Google!” But, in practice, few websites do. You shouldn’t use this method to trick your way into accessing paid content, but it’s a good alternative to BugMeNot for getting past annoying registration screens.

Get More User Agents

User Agent Switcher comes with a few popular user agents, but you can get user agents for any browser or device you can think of. Use the “Download lists of user agents to import” link in the extension’s options window to find other lists of user agents.

After downloading a list in XML format, click the Import button and import the user agents from the XML file. Or, use the New button to add and customize individual user agent strings.

I’m sure there are other clever uses for the User Agent Switcher extension — what do you use it for?

A while ago, Mozilla implemented a feature called about:config into its applications. This feature allows you to edit every single one of Firefox’s internal settings manually, yes, even settings that can’t be accessed through the normal Options panel. Gaining access to these program settings is actually quite simple. All you have to do is go to the URL bar in Firefox and type….you guessed it, about:config! Then just start typing which setting you want to tweak and it will appear on the screen.

Keep in mind that it is possible to break Firefox if you grow too adventurous and fiddle around with parameters that you shouldn’t be fiddling with. MakeUseOf is not responsible for any damage you may cause to your browser or computer by exploring the following tweaks.

browser.ctrlTab.previews

Normally, when you use Ctrl + Tab to navigate through your current tabs, Firefox will just switch from tab to tab, rendering the page with each tap. If you set this setting to true, you’ll instead be shown a row of thumbnails that you can tap through. By default, this setting is set to false.

browser.taskbar.previews.max

In Windows 7, when you hover over the Firefox taskbar icon, you’re presented with a popup that shows a thumbnail preview of all the tabs you have open. If you like to have a lot of open tabs, this list can get pretty big and wieldy. Set it to 1 to minimize its intrusion, or whatever value you prefer. By default, this setting is set to 20.

browser.tabs.closeButtons

Do you hate having an X (the close tab button) on every single open tab in Firefox? Then tweak this setting to your pleasure. Setting it to 0 will only show the X on the currently active tab. Setting it to 2 will not display the X on any tabs at all. Setting it to 3 will remove the X from all of the tabs and create a singular X at the end of the tabs list.

By default, this setting is set to 1.

browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab

In a fresh-out-of-the-box Firefox browser, closing the last remaining tab will result in the entire browser closing. Some of you may not like this. Luckily, all you have to do is change this setting to false and you’ll be able to have an open browser without having any open tabs. By default, this setting is set to true.

browser.urlbar.trimURLs

This tweak is a small one, but some of you may desperately be wanting it. Have you noticed that sometimes the URL bar will truncate the http:// portion? If you want Firefox to stop doing that, then simply change this setting to false. By default, this setting is set to true.

browser.allTabs.previews

At the end of the tabs list, there’s a small button you can click to show a list of all the currently open tabs. With this setting, you can flip it to true and transform the tab list into a tab grid. You’ll see a grid of thumbnails that show all of the tabs you have open. This is very useful for quickly exiting out of multiple tabs.

This is probably one of the more unknown tweaks out there, but it’s a most useful one. By default, this setting is set to false.

Do you know of any other awesome Firefox about:config tweaks that people would find useful? Share them with us in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Today’s Picks

As you launch the add-on, you are greeted with a gigantic macro shot of something edible (and hopefully appetizing). For example, here’s a Banana-maple tower:

This looks tiny because it is a screenshot of my full screen, resized to fit the blog. But you can see how much space the image takes up. But it’s not just an image:

You can read basic facts about the dish, and then click through to the recipe (we’ll look at the recipe display in a moment).  In case you don’t like the first dish, you can easily scroll between four other options. Since it’s an add-on, the large images all load instantly, and the whole thing feels very responsive and instant.

What’s Available

Let’s focus on the header for a moment:

Here you can clearly see the scroller used to flip between “Today’s picks“. Other entries include recipes (the bulk of the app, really), videos, and ingredients. There’s one more option to the right of favorites, which is subscribing to the BBC GoodFood newsletter. Let’s take a quick look through each of these categories.

Recipes

The initial recipe display shows each recipe as a “card” with an image and some quick facts. One thing I like about the app is that it’s very straightforward and honest about the amount of recipes available. While websites like Allrecipes.com boast an endless supply of crowd-sourced recipes, BBC GoodFood is almost like a small cookbook in your browser, with a limited and curated collection of recipes.

The top bar lets you instantly filter recipes by type, as well as by “Less than 200 calories“, “healthy classics“, etc. You can also do a custom search, if you’re after something very specific:

But realize you may not find what you’re after, due to the relatively small number of recipes the app currently offers. For example, when I searched for a chicken-based Moroccan dish that would serve six, the app found nothing. It did find a recipe when I was searching for four servings, though, so I know there is a Moroccan chicken recipe.

I wish the app could just scale ingredient lists up and down automatically by the number of servings I’d like to make – this is something Allrecipes does today, and doesn’t seem like a very difficult feat to accomplish.

Individual Recipe Display

Once you found a recipe you like, it is time to learn how to make it. The individual recipe display screen is simple and informative, with a single image of the recipe (which you can enlarge), an ingredient list, and a list of instructions. One niggle is that the typography is a bit on the tiny side, so if you want to use it as a reference while cooking, you may want to zoom in (Chrome’s zoom feature works within the add-on, so you can just hit Ctrl and +).

Cookery Videos

The video section currently has just a handful of videos about basic cooking techniques. This is one part of the app that actually didn’t work for me. The video did buffer, but I could not get it to play. Definitely underdeveloped, but it shows potential.

Healthy Ingredients

The Healthy Ingredients section lists ten different ingredients, each with nutritional information and buying, preparation and storage tips. It’s a short list, but each ingredient has a hi-resolution image and thoughtful information.

Final Thoughts

BBC GoodFood looks like a promising add-on. What I like best about it is that it feels very curated – it feels as though the recipes and all content were carefully edited. The downside is that there is not a lot of content, but if you are looking for oodles of content, there are plenty of recipe websites out there.

Encryption ensures no one can eavesdrop on your web browsing. Whether you’re searching on Google, browsing Wikipedia or sending private messages on Facebook, your information is sent in the clear if you’re not using encryption.

Getting the Extension

You won’t find HTTPS Everywhere in the official Firefox add-ons gallery; you’ll have to get it directly from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site. Just go to the HTTPS Everywhere page and click the big Install HTTPS Everywhere button.

Taking a Tour

HTTPS Everywhere adds a button to Firefox’s toolbar; you can click the button to view its status and change its settings. Let’s head over to MakeUseOf with HTTPS Everywhere installed and see what it does.

HTTPS Everywhere is enforcing encrypted connections to many services we use on MakeUseOf, although many may use encryption by default. With HTTPS Everywhere, you don’t depend on the webmaster to set up their site properly; you get encryption everywhere you go — with every service that supports it, of course.

Plug a search into the Google search box included with Firefox and you’ll go straight to Google’s encrypted search page. Any searches you make with Google’s HTTPS site are encrypted before they’re sent to Google, so no one can eavesdrop on them. Without the extension, people on public Wi-Fi networks can see all your searches.

Sure, you could head over to encrypted.google.com and start your search from there, maybe even install a search plug-in for Google’s encrypted search engine and use that instead. But HTTPS Everywhere does everything for you.

Click a link to Wikipedia and you’ll see the same thing. HTTPS Everywhere turns every Wikipedia link on the web into a link to Wikipedia’s secure, encrypted site.

What It Really Does

So what does HTTPS Everywhere actually do? We can sneak a peek at our web browsing traffic with WireShark and see for ourselves.

Let’s plug “super secret search” into Google’s normal, unencrypted search engine. With Wireshark capturing our traffic, this is what we see:

There it is. Our super secret search is being sent in plain text for all the world to see. On an open Wi-Fi network? People around you can see your super secret search. Now imagine you’re sending a private message on Facebook and you’ll see why this is important. Facebook has a secure browsing option, but having HTTPS Everywhere installed will automatically enable it for you. You won’t have to worry about finding the option on every website you use.

Now let’s turn on HTTPS Everywhere and perform the search again. HTTPS Everywhere automatically uses Google’s encrypted search engine.

Our communication with Google is happening over HTTPS now. An eavesdropper can see we’re contacting Google’s servers, but that’s all they can see — they don’t know the specific page we’re using or what type of data is getting sent back and forth.

Tools like Firesheep do the same sort of thing, but with an easier-to-use interface. You don’t have to understand networking to snoop with Firesheep.

Configuration

HTTPS Everywhere has a pretty barebones configuration screen. You can see the list of websites it supports and disable them if you encounter problems. You can also enable rules that are disabled by default, possibly because they break certain features on a site.

Want to add your own HTTPS Everywhere rules? You can’t do that from this window, but the EFF has a guide for doing that yourself. Bear in mind that you can only enable HTTPS for a site if that site has an HTTPS version that isn’t used by default. HTTPS Everywhere includes most popular sites that have HTTPS versions, so you probably shouldn’t have to create any rules yourself.

Other Web Browsers

Like the idea, but use another web browser? No other browser has the extensions framework that makes HTTPS Everywhere possible. Google Chrome is closest to getting there, but Internet Explorer and Safari users are out of luck.

If you use Chrome, you can try KB SSL Enforcer, which we’ve covered here. KB SSL Enforcer doesn’t work as well as HTTPS Everywhere; it fetches the HTTP page before the HTTPS page. The EFF promises to release HTTPS Everywhere for Chrome when Chrome’s extension framework evolves to make it possible.

HTTPS Everywhere is definitely a compelling reason to switch to Firefox if you use another web browser — or is it? Do you prefer another browser anyway? Let us know in the comments.

I love our commenters. You guys ask me questions, give me tips and generally help make this site what it is. It’s particularly true over at MakeUseOf Answers, where for the most part it’s our readers providing the best solutions for technical problems. It’s true on most tech-oriented sites – people just help each other out, outside of the occasional Mac/Windows/Linux flamewar thread.

It’s a different matter elsewhere, however, including newspapers and YouTube. People type what’s on their mind before they think, and certainly aren’t trying to be helpful. Frequently they’re not even talking about anything relevant. This post from NPR sums things up nicely, but it gets much worse than that. XKCD offered one solution for the problem, but if you’d rather not wait for that fix to take hold I highly recommend Shut Up. It’s a simple installation and works so well you’ll forget it’s there.

Get Rid Of Them!

First things first, download Shut Up from the Chrome Web Store. Once the extension is set up you’ll see a new icon on your extension dock; click it any time you want to turn comments back on for a particular site. Like I said before, Shut Up will remember which sites you like seeing comments on.

How well does this work?  Very well. I tested it on a variety of sites, and found that comments simply disappeared. For example, here is YouTube with comments:

Hurray, arguments! Here’s how the bottom of a YouTube video looks without comments:

The noise is replaced with white space, allowing you to watch videos without someone stating that they think one girl is hot or calling the uploader a homo. Brilliant! For some reason you can still leave a comment. Don’t.

Similarly, if you’re sick of nuanced news articles being followed by an in-depth discussion of which politician is the biggest douchebag, you can create white space below newspaper articles as well:

Voila! The comments box remains, but the comments are gone, meaning you can continue believing in the intelligence of mankind.

By default, Shut Up remembers which sites you turned comments on for. You can change this simply in the settings:

That’s about it for this extremely simple plugin. It worked for me on a vareity of blogs, including MakeUseOf and Lifehacker. It also worked on every newspaper I tried it with.

Give it a spin yourself and feel free to let us know if it works for you. In the comments (ironic, I know).

The Futility Of Comments

I’m all for people being able to speak their minds, and there are certainly examples around the web of comments sections being helpful and engaging. It’s certainly not the norm, though, which is why I like this plugin.

Of course, this tool can also be used to remove MakeUseOf’s comments. It shouldn’t be. Our commenters are, for the most part, awesome. Sometimes Dave LeClair says something stupid, but that’s worth putting up with for the sake of the rest of you. Speaking of Dave, he recently wrote a half-decent article about extensions for Chrome that clean up the web. It’s pretty good, considering who wrote it.

Do you know of any other cool tools to block website comments? Suggest them in the comments below. I realize you probably won’t, because you’ve blocked our comments, but whatever.

I personally hate installing extra toolbars in my browser, and not only because they take up screen real estate. But the potential usefulness of Citelighter piqued my interest enough to overcome my reluctance. Citelighter is not merely for students, because with its information gathering features, it could be handy across the board for bloggers, writers, office workers, even stay-at-home moms.

How does a citation tool help us?

Citation is defined as a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted text. You can call it a reference. If you are still confused, just open up a Wikipedia entry and head below to the section called References. A citation also similarly acknowledges previously published works and in case of the web, links to it. There are various styles for publishing citations in research papers and on the web. But we will not go into that. For us, it’s more useful to learn what we can do with a citation and research tool like Citelighter.

• Citation is the best way to avoid charges of plagiarism or copying.
• Information is reusable. Crediting the source of the original information helps everyone because a reader can go back to the source and dive deeper into the material.
• Citations help to respect intellectual property rights of the person who created the source text in the first place

Organizing information with Citelighter

Citelighter is described as a fully automated bibliography, citation, research, and internet highlighting tool. It works as a Firefox plug-in. Citation is in public beta now, but is gradually progressing towards maturity as a full-fledged academic research tool.

Let’s see how it automates the whole process of collating information and preparing a research paper (or any paper).

1. To get started, register with an email account or Facebook Connect. Next, you have to download the Firefox plug-in which shows up as a toolbar after you restart the browser. The screenshot in the next point gives you an idea of how it looks after an install on Firefox.

2. Start a project. You can also set a due date for project completion and set reminders. The next steps are pretty simple.

3. Surf the web and start collecting information from webpages. Citelighter does not yet work on PDF files, but with webpages it’s a smooth flow.

4. Highlight all relevant information with the mouse by selecting the text as you would with a highlighter pen and clicking the Capture button.

A small sub-toolbar drops down and gives you an option to edit the capture or add extra comments. Citelighter automatically captures the information, but as you can see in the edit box below, you can fine-tune your capture by adding a lot of citation worthy info.

5. As you keep collecting the info, you can press the View button anytime to see all that you’ve saved. It’s arranged in points. The View window is where most of the information organization takes place. You can drag & drop to reorder all the data you have collected. You can click on Comments and type in more information required for your paper or notes.

6. Scroll down and you see all the bibliographic information neatly recorded as per the order you collected the information. You can customize it according to the three styles presently on offer right now – APA, MLA, and Chicago.

7. Once you’ve completed your research, press the Export button to send all the organized data (or selected ones) to a MS Word document, Google Docs, email, or printer.

8. The My Projects page (accessed from home icon on the toolbar) lists all your projects. You can use the search bar to search for specific text stings within all your projects listed here.

Footnotes…

Citelighter is a quick research tool to collect and organize your research notes. It works well on webpages, but it’s still not tuned for PDFs. That may go against it, but these are still early stages and the project is evolving. It just might be the premium feature when the developers start offering it in paid and free flavors. Browser extensions for Chrome and Safari are also in the offing. Citelighter is also putting a points system in place for more community participation.

When it comes to citation and bibliography tools, I like Citelighter for its speed and ease of use. What about you? Which research tool would you recommend?

I tried to have the same outlook while searching for a few good offbeat (but almost useless) Chrome extensions inside the Chrome Web Store. Searching for these hidden ‘gems’ is an exercise in fun, because you never know what you will come across. After all, didn’t they say that Twitter was useless as a communication tool?

So, tag alone and do your own digging. In the meantime, tell me what you think of these seven offbeat Chrome extensions.

Jimmy Wales

You would be living in a digital la-la land if you don’t know who Jimmy Wales is. Well, he is the nice guy who co-founded Wikipedia. You owe it to him when the encyclopedia tells you everything that you throw at it. Some days you see a banner asking for a donation or making a personal appeal when you visit Wikipedia. With the Jimmy Wales Chrome extension, you can get his handsome mug shot beam down at you from every page you visit on Google Chrome.

Use: Serves as a gentle reminder of what we wouldn’t be able to do if Wikipedia sinks.

Look of Disapproval

A good enough social and communication Chrome extension, but the only communicating you would be doing is showing your dislike. Look of Disapproval is a set of expressive emoticons mostly composed of Unicode characters. You can use them to show your disapproval on any website, social forum, or discussion board.

Use: I am taking it to Facebook ???????

Mustachio

Groucho Marx or Tom Selleck, I don’t know which one you prefer. Me, I hate moustaches; but that doesn’t stop me from playing around with this extension on any image that’s over 300px X 150px. Adding moustaches to photos is childish play, but fun for a child.

Use: Minimal, because you will go crazy finding the right image to add a moustache too. Try it on your girlfriend’s photo when she is not around.

Jailbreak the Patriarchy

This offbeat Chrome extension swaps the gender anywhere you encounter it on the web. Male turns into female and vice-versa. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”. It works on Google search results too. You can toggle between male and female gender swaps.

Use: Makes for fun reading, but does very little for the Battle of the Sexes as everything is equally swapped.

2012 Countdown

The Mayan’s aren’t here anymore, and they damn well made sure that come 2012 no one else will. As the description of this offbeat but fun Chrome extension puts it – A simple countdown to keep track of time when the world will end (December 21, 2012). Meant for fun, not to make you depressed.

Use: Meant for fun, not to make you depressed.

AutoRage

This offbeat extension replaces faces in an image with rage faces. This extension is just an extension of a pop culture.

Use: For those who are heavily into Rage comics.

Nothing

Precisely! This extension does nothing. Perhaps, it was someone’s idea of a passing the time when he had nothing left to code. Do read the reviews. As someone puts it – There is pretty small number of things that working one hundred percent perfectly… this extension is one of them.

Use: 3500+ users…did they find something in the nothing?

These seven Chrome extensions serve to while away a lazy afternoon. It certainly helped me do exactly that. Did it do the same thing for you? Did I miss some great Chrome extensions that are useless, offbeat…but still interesting? Send us the mentions in the comments and tell us about your favorite ones.

Set Up Bookmark Syncing In Chrome

For ChromeMarks Lite to work, you first need to enable syncing of your Google Chrome bookmarks between computers. In the browser, click the wrench icon in the top right and open > Options. It will open in a new tab. Go to > Personal Stuff and click the > Sign in to Chrome or > Set up sync… button, depending on what is displayed for you.

In the advanced sync preferences pop-up window, select the items you want to sync, such as your > Bookmarks. When you’re done click OK.

Your bookmarks will now be synced with your Google account. To access your Google Chrome bookmarks on a different installation of the browser, simply perform these same steps and all your synced data will be imported from your Google account and subsequently synced with it.

Set Up ChromeMarks Lite On Your Android Device

To access the bookmarks that are synced from your Google Chrome desktop browser to your Google account, download and install ChromeMarks Lite.

When you first open the app, you will see that there are no bookmarks in the database yet. Click the > sync button to initiate the synchronization.

Note that you first have to provide permission to the app. Once this is done, it will initialize and start syncing your bookmarks from your Google account.

This procedure will only take a few seconds and then all your bookmarks will be available in the ChromeMarks Lite app, as shown below. Note that ChromeMarks Lite does not support auto-syncing. Hence, to get the latest bookmarks from your Google account, you occasionally need to click the > Sync button in the top right.

When you click a bookmark, it will either open directly in your default browser or ask you which browser you want it to open with.

By the way, clicking on a bookmark for more than a second will open a menu with options to open it in a new window, share the link or copy the URL.

Does ChromeMarks Sync With My Android Browser Bookmarks?

ChromeMarks Lite does not offer this feature. To integrate ChromeMarks with your Android browser, you have to upgrade to the full version of the app. Unfortunately, Honeycomb and some Samsung users are partly left out, as the tool does not integrate or sync with the stock browser on Android Honeycomb and some Samsung phones. However, before you risk upgrading, you can verify whether or not your device will support the upgrade options using ChromeMarks Lite.

Click the menu icon in the top right, then select > Settings and go to > Upgrade Options.

A green checkmark indicates that your device supports the respective feature, while items marked with a red cross will not be available. Since I am on a Samsung Honeycomb tablet, ChromeMarks presently is not able to sync with my browser bookmarks.

Conclusion

It is a pity that you have to use a third-party app on your Google Android device to access bookmarks synced to your Google account. However, at least this app comfortably enables you to access bookmarks synced with your Google account and despite the limitations of the free version, it is very useful. I reckon that the paid version is worth upgrading to if your Android device supports syncing with your installed browser. Otherwise it’s only worth it if you want to enable manual editing of bookmarks and auto-syncing.

How do you sync bookmarks between your desktop and mobile devices?