There are all kinds of ways the web can wind you up and slow you down. Even your favourite sites can sometimes frustrate you. Pages that take ages to load, garish background colours that make text hard to read, adverts that obstruct your view, links that don’t take you where they claim to; the list of common annoyances goes on and on. Fortunately, there are plenty of free tools and tricks you can use to fix these problems, and with a spot of customisation, you’ll soon have the web looking and behaving the way you want. Often, this is as simple as installing a browser add-on that will perform the required enhancements with a single click of its toolbar button. In this feature, we show you quick and easy ways to remove unwanted elements from web pages, change colours and fonts to suit your tastes, add useful new options, speed up navigation, boost security and much more.
REDESIGN WEB PAGES
Remix websites using Hackasaurus
Hackasaurus (hackasaurus.org) is a clever new tool for Firefox, Chrome and Safari that lets you make changes to web pages and then share the results. For example, you can swap one image for another, enter different text and edit the HTML source code. To use Hackasaurus, which has been created by Mozilla to help people master web design, firs t drag the X-Ray Goggles bookmarklet to your Bookmarks bar. When you find a page you want to “remix”, click this bu tto n and play around with the on-screen elements. When you’re finished, you can publish your changed version on the web for everyone to see.
Remove distractions from pages
If you find a particular element on a website annoying, such as a scrolling social-media feed or an unpleasant
photo, you can use HackTheWeb to remove it. This nifty Firefox add-on lets you quickly make changes to the look of a website, and will remember your preferences for future visits. To activate the add-on, right-click the page, select HackTheWeb, then left-click to remove unwanted elements from the layout. It also supports keystrokes, so you can make changes such as widening a text box or removing a coloured background, with a single key press.
Redesign any website from scratch
Stylebot is an ingenious Chrome add-on that lets you change the appearance of websites using a simple on-screen editor. You can alter the font size, colour and page layout and, if you know your way around CSS, you can even write your own custom scripts. Changes are saved instantly and remain in place for all future visits. You can share, browse and install custom styles on Stylebot Social.
Add Bing wallpaper to Google
Bing’s daily homepage photos are often stunning, but many people find that its search results simply aren’t as good as Google’s. Fortunately, you can get the best of both worlds using the Chrome extension Bing Wallpaper for Google Homepage. Once it’s installed, go to Google (www.google.com) and Bing’s wallpaper will be displayed as the background, updating automatically every day.
Make websites kinder on the eyes
Lots of websites (Google in particular) choose to display dark text on a light or white background, which can feel a bit like staring into a lightbulb. Reduce the strain on your eyes by installing Hacker Vision, a Chrome extension that applies a high-contrast dark theme to most websites you visit. Once installed, just browse the web as normal. If you want go back to viewing a website as it’s intended to look, click the icon and select Pause Hacker Vision. The add-on also increases battery life on laptops.
Change the colour of websites
Color That Site is a Firefox add-on that lets you easily change the foreground and background colours of any website. Just click the button on your browser’s status bar, then click Go and use the sliders to make your changes. You can save the results so a site retains your chosen colour scheme every time you visit. You can also export your changes to apply on other PCs.
Instantly invert colours in Chrome
High Contrast for Chrome makes sites with bright backgrounds easier to read. Click the toolbar button to instantly invert their colours or contrast so that, for example, white becomes black and black becomes white. You can also view pages in greyscale if you want to remove other colours altogether, or opt for a yellow-on-black scheme that makes the text stand out.
Apply themes to Facebook
Facebook is continually tweaking its design, but it’s always instantly recognisable as Facebook. If you want to give the social network a major makeover while keeping the layout and features in place, install Facebook Themes. This Chrome extension provides a collection of themes you can apply to the site to give it a fresh feel. Just click the new Themes option that appears in the top-right corner of Facebook, then click the Explore button to find a suitable theme. Options include Manchester United, The Simpsons and Bob Marley, and you can easily disable or delete any themes if you don’t like them or they don’t work.
Remove adverts and other annoyances
Most of us are familiar with Adblock Plus (adblockplus.org/en), which is available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Android. This amazing add-on automatically strips adverts from any websites you visit and works so well, you won’t even notice it running. For example, did you know that as well as blocking Flash adverts, Adblock Plus also filters ads on Facebook and YouTube, and stops pop-ups and pop-unders. It even automatically corrects mistakes when typing web addresses, to prevent you from visiting malicious sites. If you find that some ads are slipping through, this may be because Adblock Plus deems them “acceptable” (they don’t obscure content, interrupt your reading flow or pretend not to be ads). If you want to block these, too, go into the add -on’s Options and disable “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”.
Block adverts in Internet Explorer
Although Adblock Plus is available for most browsers, the re’s always been one exception: Internet Explorer. While there are other ad-blocking solutions for Microsoft’s browser, such as Simple Adblock (simple-adblock.com), they aren’t as good. Fortunately, the team behind Adblock Plus has been working hard to make its blocker compatible with IE, and there are now experimental versions of the add-on you can
download for both 32- and 64 -bit systems (adblockplus.org/en/internetexplorer). Because these are early releases, you should expect to find a few bugs.
Hack YouTube to block adverts
While we certainly don’t begrudge video makers for earning an income from the ir creations, YouTube adverts can sometimes be very annoying and disruptive to your viewing. ScrewAds Plus for YouTube (www.facebook.com/YouTubeAdBlocker) is an extension for Firefox and Chrome tha t will remove all trace of adverts from the videos you watch. You can toggle the ad blocker on or off as required.
Remove comments from websites
Originally designed to remove undesirable comments from YouTube, Comment Snob now works with numerous other websites. This excellent extension is available for both Firefox and Chrome, and lets you set your own filtering preferences. For example, you can hide comments that contain no capital letters, or are written all in caps, and ban those that feature excessive punctuation (multiple exclamation marks for instance!!!) or contain profanity. You can even add your own keywords and phrases to filter out.
Remove clutter from web pages
Readability Redux is a handy add-on for Chrome that strips all the distracting clutter from a website so you can focus on reading an article. It’s particularly useful on text-heavy websites such as Wikipedia. To use Readability Redux, just click its toolbar button and the add-on will automatically remove all the distractions for you. You can print the simplified page (saving you ink and time), and share it with other people. You can also reload the original layout at any time.
Remove spoilers on social networks
When you’re planning to watch a new film or episode of your favorite show, going online can be a minefield as you try to avoid “spoilers” that reveal important plot points. You can solve the problem by installing Silencer, a smart new add-on for Chrome that lets you mute or filter potential spoilers on Facebook and Twitter. You can enter keywords to block or use Mute Packs for popular shows such as Game of Thrones and Arres ted Development.
Hack Facebook to improve its tools
Social Fixer for Facebook (socialfixer.com) is an add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari that improves Facebook by removing annoyances and adding extra features such as tabbed news feeds, themes, advanced feed filters, and the ability to hide posts you’ve read. It also highlights new comments, enlarges thumbnails and, perhaps most usefully, alerts you when someone unfriends you.
Add extra features to YouTube
If you’ve ever thought that Google’s video site was lacking in features, such as enhanced DVD-style playback and the ability to zoom in and out of part of a video, then you’ll love the Chrome add-on, EmbedPlus for YouTube. Once installed, it adds an extra bar to the bottom of the video window that you can use to control playback. It also adds a browser button for configuring its many options.
Extend your Amazon Wish List
Ever wondered how much money you’d need to save to buy everything on your Amazon Wish List? Find out by installing the Chrome add-on Amazon WishList Extender, which works with both the UK and US versions of Amazon and tots up the price of everything you have in your Wish List. It shows the number of items, the number of unique items (in case you’ve added the same thing more than once), and the total price you’ll have to pay for all the items you’re wishing for.
Add IMDb ratings to iPlayer
It can be tricky to tell if a film on iPlayer is worth watching, because although the BBC’s description tells you what it ’s about, it doesn’t say how good or bad the movie is. Help is at hand from the iPlayer IMDb Film Ratings add-on for Chrome, which shows the IMDb ratings (out of 10) for every film on ¡Player. Clicking the link will take you the IMDb page for further information.
Preview links without clicking them
Swift Preview is a Chrome add-on that lets you preview links on popular sites including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and Reddit. This prevents you from wasting time or risking embarrassment by opening irrelevant or unsuitable sites. Once installed, all you have to do is hover your mouse over a link and a preview of the site, image or video it relates to will appear in a floating window. You can toggle the previews
feature on or off using the toolbar button. A similar add-on for Firefox called Cool Previews (www.coolpreviews.com), also shows previews of web pages, photos and videos. You can decide whether they appear when you hover over links or click them, and you can opt to keep the preview window permanently open.
Get the gist of an article without reading it
Why waste time reading an entire article when you can get the essence of it using Chrome add-on CruxLight. To see a summary of the page you’re on, click CruxLight’s toolbar button and it will highlight the im p ortan t sections and pull out the main keywords. You can use the slider to get more or less information, search for specific words and names, and share or save the summary. See our Mini Workshop opposite to find out how to use CruxLight.
Speed up sites that use Google fonts
Google provides a large collection of free fonts that web developers can use to make their sites look more attractive. To view a page that uses these fonts, your browser needs to download them in the background. You can make these sites load faster by installing them on your PC or Mac, using SkyFonts (www.fonts.com/web-fonts/google). Once installed, you’ll also be able to use the fonts offline in your own documents and designs.
View multi-page articles on one page
Some websites like to spread certain types of article, such as Top 10 lists and photo slideshows, across multiple pages. They do this to maximise your exposure to adverts and increase their number of page views, but having to continually click Next can become annoying. PageZipper solves this problem by automatically merging all the pages into one easy-to-read article. Just click the PageZipper button and scroll down the merged content.
Keep track of where you are on the page
It’s easy to lose your place when you’re scrolling through a very long article. Scroll Marker is a handy add-on for Chrome tha t draws a line at the bottom of the page, so you can see the point that you’ve read up to (or down to, rather). As you scroll down, the line stays in position; when you stop scrolling, the line drops back to the foot of the page. You can adjust the line’s colour, opacity, width and distance from the bottom of the page.
Exclude certain websites from results
When you run a search on Google, the results always include the most relevant pages. But these may include results you don’t want to see, such as sites you don’t like, or ones you know are untrustworthy. Personal Blocklist is an official Google add-on for Chrome tha t lets you block sites from your results. Just run a search and click the Block link under a result. Click the add-on’s toolbar button to review and unblock excluded sites.
Search the web from anywhere
One of the most useful features in modern browsers is the ability to search directly from your address bar. To speed things up even more, install Simple = Select + Search for Chrome. Instead of copying and pasting text into your address bar or search box, you can use the right click menu to search. Just highlight a word or phrase on a site, click the right-hand mouse button, choose Search and select the search engine you want.
Search multiple sites at once
Most of us stick with Google for searching, but sometimes it ’s useful to try a different search engine to see if it produces be tte r results. Multi Search for Chrome lets you access multiple search engines from the right-click menu, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia and IMDb. Alternatively, you can search directly from your browser’s address bar by typing multi followed by your search query. You can customise the list of search engines to include only the ones you want.
Deface your friends’ Facebook and Flickr photos
If you’re always doodling glasses and moustaches on celebrities’ faces in magazines, you’ll love Coolpic. This Chrome add-on lets you add cartoon extras to your friends’ Facebook or Flickr photos, which you can keep for your own amusement or share with others. Open an image, click the Coolpic option and you can drag headgear, facial hair, eyewear, props and speech bubbles onto the photo.
Hide messages in Facebook photos
Secretbook is a sneaky new Chrome add-on that lets you share private messages on Facebook by concealing them in photos (a technique known as steganography). When you’re viewing Facebook, press Ctrl+Alt+A to bring up the ‘Generate a Secretbook Image’ box. Select an image from your hard drive, type the text you want to hide and secure it with a password. Click ‘Create and download’, then upload the encrypted message and tell your password to selected friends. They’ll be able to read your secret message by pressing Ctrl+Alt+A and entering the password, while everyone else remains oblivious.
Make YouTube less annoying
YouTube is an excellent site, but it has lots of irrita ting elements. YouTube Options for Chrome lets you fix all manner of annoyances, such as annotations, adverts and videos playing automatically. You can easily change the video resolution and display size, and use your mouse wheel to make aimmediate changes, including turning the volume up or down. Although it ’s clearly designed for YouTube, the add-on will also work on most other video sites.
Turn YouTube into a cinema
If you find your enjoyment of watching web videos marred by comments, video recommendations and other distractions around the clip itself, you can use Turn Off The Lights in Chrome to darken the page around the video and make it seem like the screen in a (very small) cinema. Before you start playing the video, click the button and everything will dim. It won’t be a total blackout, so you’ll still be able to see the page around the window.
Force YouTube videos to play in HD
You can tell YouTube to always play videos in HD when you switch to full-screen view. Click the arrow next to your picture and go to YouTube Settings, then click the Playback link and tick ‘Always play HD on full screen (when available)’. However, this trick doesn’t always work, so you may prefer to install YouTube High Definition for Firefox, which lets you enjoy YouTube videos at the highest resolution available, or at a resolution of your choosing. Another useful Firefox add-on, YouTube All HTML5, lets you switch to HTML5 versions of videos with a single click.
Force websites into their secure versions
Most major websites, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, offer Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to prevent third parties from snooping on your web traffic. The HTTPS Everywhere extension (www.eff.org/https-everywhere) for Chrome and Firefox automatically takes you to the secure version of pages, and ensures you don’t accidentally go to an unencrypted page on the site. You can choose which services to use and even create your own sets of rules.
Prevent websites tracking you
Most modern web browsers have an option that lets you tell websites you don’t want to be tracked, but AVG Do Not Track fo r Chrome is a more advanced add-on. Go to any website and it will tell you what (if any) elements on the page are tracking you, including social buttons and web analytics. Click the browser button to block specific elements with a single click, or opttoblock them all. There’s also a settings screen that lets you block multiple ad networks. See our feature on page 54 to find out more about AVG’s latest tools.
Turn on two-step verification
To prevent unauthorised access to your Google account, you can protectit by setting up two-step verification (also known as two-factor authentication). This adds an extra layer of security to your account by sending a unique code to your phone, which you’ll need to use to log into your account alongside your usual email address and password. If you’re using a safe PC, such as your home computer, you can make this a one-time option so that only people on other devices will be asked for the code. To set up two-factor authentication for Google, go to. Facebook and Twitter also offer two-factor verification for your account. In Facebook, click the settings icon in the top-right corner, choose Account Settings and click Security. Click the Edit link next to 'Require a security code to access my account from unknown browsers’ and follow the instructions. In Twitter (which only added this feature in May), go to ‘Account settings’, click ‘Require a verification code when I sign in’ and click the link to add a phone
If you like Windows 7, but would like it even more if it looked, sounded and behaved the way you want it to, here are some tips for making it work the way you want.
Personalise your display
Right-click the Desktop, select Personalize and explore the Personalization window for creative ways to tweak your display. For example, you can change the background to a slideshow of your favourite photos; use application windows as screen savers; and change the colour and transparency of windows. The links on the left of the Personalization window offer lots more customisation options, including changing your mouse cursor, editing your display resolution and changing your account picture.
Customise your sounds
Ditch the default Windows bleeps for other sounds. Click ‘Change system sounds’ in the ‘Hardware and Sound’ section of the Control Panel and choose a new Sound Scheme from the drop-down box. Options include Sonata, which uses classical instruments, and Garden, which uses soothing outdoor sounds. You can match different events to different sounds and mix and match the schemes to fit your tastes.
Train Windows to behave
Rather than putting up with Windows’ annoying habits, change them. For example, if you don’t like the AutoPlay window that pops up when you plug in a device or disc, switch it off or change its default action in ‘Hardware and Sound’. Other system behaviour you can change in the Control Panel includes showing or hiding hidden folders and automatically opening file types in certain programs.
Websites, programs and browsers work hard to stay up-to-date, but you don’t always want them to. Here’s how to backdate rather than update.
Visit websites that are no longer online
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is a digital time capsule containing 250 billion working versions of old web pages going back to 1996. Whenever a web page is updated, a version is saved here for posterity. To start exploring the archive, type a URL into the Wayback Machine box on the Internet Archive homepage and choose a date from the calendar. Click a time to open the page as it was at that time on that date. Links on the archived pages still work if the linked page is also saved, though images and Flash content may no longer appear. It’s a useful and fascinating resource.
Switch back to a previous version
If you’d rather be running a previous version of your browser or other software, OldApps (www.oldapps.com) has a huge collection of current and previous incarnations, from AOL Instant Messenger to WinZip, and you can download any of them for free. New versions are added to the database as soon as they’re available, and all downloads are screened for malware and viruses. Programs are listed with release dates, system requirements and screenshots to help you choose the right version, and you can subscribe to updates about your favourite software. Be aware though, that older versions of software often aren’t as secure as the latest releases.
Remove distractions from pages
If you find a particular element on a website annoying, such as a scrolling social-media feed or an unpleasant
photo, you can use HackTheWeb to remove it. This nifty Firefox add-on lets you quickly make changes to the look of a website, and will remember your preferences for future visits. To activate the add-on, right-click the page, select HackTheWeb, then left-click to remove unwanted elements from the layout. It also supports keystrokes, so you can make changes such as widening a text box or removing a coloured background, with a single key press.
Redesign any website from scratch
Stylebot is an ingenious Chrome add-on that lets you change the appearance of websites using a simple on-screen editor. You can alter the font size, colour and page layout and, if you know your way around CSS, you can even write your own custom scripts. Changes are saved instantly and remain in place for all future visits. You can share, browse and install custom styles on Stylebot Social.
Add Bing wallpaper to Google
Bing’s daily homepage photos are often stunning, but many people find that its search results simply aren’t as good as Google’s. Fortunately, you can get the best of both worlds using the Chrome extension Bing Wallpaper for Google Homepage. Once it’s installed, go to Google (www.google.com) and Bing’s wallpaper will be displayed as the background, updating automatically every day.
Make websites kinder on the eyes
Lots of websites (Google in particular) choose to display dark text on a light or white background, which can feel a bit like staring into a lightbulb. Reduce the strain on your eyes by installing Hacker Vision, a Chrome extension that applies a high-contrast dark theme to most websites you visit. Once installed, just browse the web as normal. If you want go back to viewing a website as it’s intended to look, click the icon and select Pause Hacker Vision. The add-on also increases battery life on laptops.
Change the colour of websites
Color That Site is a Firefox add-on that lets you easily change the foreground and background colours of any website. Just click the button on your browser’s status bar, then click Go and use the sliders to make your changes. You can save the results so a site retains your chosen colour scheme every time you visit. You can also export your changes to apply on other PCs.
Instantly invert colours in Chrome
High Contrast for Chrome makes sites with bright backgrounds easier to read. Click the toolbar button to instantly invert their colours or contrast so that, for example, white becomes black and black becomes white. You can also view pages in greyscale if you want to remove other colours altogether, or opt for a yellow-on-black scheme that makes the text stand out.
Apply themes to Facebook
Facebook is continually tweaking its design, but it’s always instantly recognisable as Facebook. If you want to give the social network a major makeover while keeping the layout and features in place, install Facebook Themes. This Chrome extension provides a collection of themes you can apply to the site to give it a fresh feel. Just click the new Themes option that appears in the top-right corner of Facebook, then click the Explore button to find a suitable theme. Options include Manchester United, The Simpsons and Bob Marley, and you can easily disable or delete any themes if you don’t like them or they don’t work.
BLOCK UNWANTED CONTENT
Remove adverts and other annoyances
Most of us are familiar with Adblock Plus (adblockplus.org/en), which is available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Android. This amazing add-on automatically strips adverts from any websites you visit and works so well, you won’t even notice it running. For example, did you know that as well as blocking Flash adverts, Adblock Plus also filters ads on Facebook and YouTube, and stops pop-ups and pop-unders. It even automatically corrects mistakes when typing web addresses, to prevent you from visiting malicious sites. If you find that some ads are slipping through, this may be because Adblock Plus deems them “acceptable” (they don’t obscure content, interrupt your reading flow or pretend not to be ads). If you want to block these, too, go into the add -on’s Options and disable “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”.
Block adverts in Internet Explorer
Although Adblock Plus is available for most browsers, the re’s always been one exception: Internet Explorer. While there are other ad-blocking solutions for Microsoft’s browser, such as Simple Adblock (simple-adblock.com), they aren’t as good. Fortunately, the team behind Adblock Plus has been working hard to make its blocker compatible with IE, and there are now experimental versions of the add-on you can
download for both 32- and 64 -bit systems (adblockplus.org/en/internetexplorer). Because these are early releases, you should expect to find a few bugs.
Hack YouTube to block adverts
While we certainly don’t begrudge video makers for earning an income from the ir creations, YouTube adverts can sometimes be very annoying and disruptive to your viewing. ScrewAds Plus for YouTube (www.facebook.com/YouTubeAdBlocker) is an extension for Firefox and Chrome tha t will remove all trace of adverts from the videos you watch. You can toggle the ad blocker on or off as required.
Remove comments from websites
Originally designed to remove undesirable comments from YouTube, Comment Snob now works with numerous other websites. This excellent extension is available for both Firefox and Chrome, and lets you set your own filtering preferences. For example, you can hide comments that contain no capital letters, or are written all in caps, and ban those that feature excessive punctuation (multiple exclamation marks for instance!!!) or contain profanity. You can even add your own keywords and phrases to filter out.
Remove clutter from web pages
Readability Redux is a handy add-on for Chrome that strips all the distracting clutter from a website so you can focus on reading an article. It’s particularly useful on text-heavy websites such as Wikipedia. To use Readability Redux, just click its toolbar button and the add-on will automatically remove all the distractions for you. You can print the simplified page (saving you ink and time), and share it with other people. You can also reload the original layout at any time.
Remove spoilers on social networks
When you’re planning to watch a new film or episode of your favorite show, going online can be a minefield as you try to avoid “spoilers” that reveal important plot points. You can solve the problem by installing Silencer, a smart new add-on for Chrome that lets you mute or filter potential spoilers on Facebook and Twitter. You can enter keywords to block or use Mute Packs for popular shows such as Game of Thrones and Arres ted Development.
ADD NEW FEATURES
Hack Facebook to improve its tools
Social Fixer for Facebook (socialfixer.com) is an add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari that improves Facebook by removing annoyances and adding extra features such as tabbed news feeds, themes, advanced feed filters, and the ability to hide posts you’ve read. It also highlights new comments, enlarges thumbnails and, perhaps most usefully, alerts you when someone unfriends you.
Add extra features to YouTube
If you’ve ever thought that Google’s video site was lacking in features, such as enhanced DVD-style playback and the ability to zoom in and out of part of a video, then you’ll love the Chrome add-on, EmbedPlus for YouTube. Once installed, it adds an extra bar to the bottom of the video window that you can use to control playback. It also adds a browser button for configuring its many options.
Extend your Amazon Wish List
Ever wondered how much money you’d need to save to buy everything on your Amazon Wish List? Find out by installing the Chrome add-on Amazon WishList Extender, which works with both the UK and US versions of Amazon and tots up the price of everything you have in your Wish List. It shows the number of items, the number of unique items (in case you’ve added the same thing more than once), and the total price you’ll have to pay for all the items you’re wishing for.
Add IMDb ratings to iPlayer
It can be tricky to tell if a film on iPlayer is worth watching, because although the BBC’s description tells you what it ’s about, it doesn’t say how good or bad the movie is. Help is at hand from the iPlayer IMDb Film Ratings add-on for Chrome, which shows the IMDb ratings (out of 10) for every film on ¡Player. Clicking the link will take you the IMDb page for further information.
SPEED UP NAVIGATION
Preview links without clicking them
Swift Preview is a Chrome add-on that lets you preview links on popular sites including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and Reddit. This prevents you from wasting time or risking embarrassment by opening irrelevant or unsuitable sites. Once installed, all you have to do is hover your mouse over a link and a preview of the site, image or video it relates to will appear in a floating window. You can toggle the previews
feature on or off using the toolbar button. A similar add-on for Firefox called Cool Previews (www.coolpreviews.com), also shows previews of web pages, photos and videos. You can decide whether they appear when you hover over links or click them, and you can opt to keep the preview window permanently open.
Get the gist of an article without reading it
Why waste time reading an entire article when you can get the essence of it using Chrome add-on CruxLight. To see a summary of the page you’re on, click CruxLight’s toolbar button and it will highlight the im p ortan t sections and pull out the main keywords. You can use the slider to get more or less information, search for specific words and names, and share or save the summary. See our Mini Workshop opposite to find out how to use CruxLight.
Speed up sites that use Google fonts
Google provides a large collection of free fonts that web developers can use to make their sites look more attractive. To view a page that uses these fonts, your browser needs to download them in the background. You can make these sites load faster by installing them on your PC or Mac, using SkyFonts (www.fonts.com/web-fonts/google). Once installed, you’ll also be able to use the fonts offline in your own documents and designs.
View multi-page articles on one page
Some websites like to spread certain types of article, such as Top 10 lists and photo slideshows, across multiple pages. They do this to maximise your exposure to adverts and increase their number of page views, but having to continually click Next can become annoying. PageZipper solves this problem by automatically merging all the pages into one easy-to-read article. Just click the PageZipper button and scroll down the merged content.
Keep track of where you are on the page
It’s easy to lose your place when you’re scrolling through a very long article. Scroll Marker is a handy add-on for Chrome tha t draws a line at the bottom of the page, so you can see the point that you’ve read up to (or down to, rather). As you scroll down, the line stays in position; when you stop scrolling, the line drops back to the foot of the page. You can adjust the line’s colour, opacity, width and distance from the bottom of the page.
IMPROVE YOUR SEARCHES
Exclude certain websites from results
When you run a search on Google, the results always include the most relevant pages. But these may include results you don’t want to see, such as sites you don’t like, or ones you know are untrustworthy. Personal Blocklist is an official Google add-on for Chrome tha t lets you block sites from your results. Just run a search and click the Block link under a result. Click the add-on’s toolbar button to review and unblock excluded sites.
Search the web from anywhere
One of the most useful features in modern browsers is the ability to search directly from your address bar. To speed things up even more, install Simple = Select + Search for Chrome. Instead of copying and pasting text into your address bar or search box, you can use the right click menu to search. Just highlight a word or phrase on a site, click the right-hand mouse button, choose Search and select the search engine you want.
Search multiple sites at once
Most of us stick with Google for searching, but sometimes it ’s useful to try a different search engine to see if it produces be tte r results. Multi Search for Chrome lets you access multiple search engines from the right-click menu, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia and IMDb. Alternatively, you can search directly from your browser’s address bar by typing multi followed by your search query. You can customise the list of search engines to include only the ones you want.
HACK PHOTOS AND VIDEOS
Deface your friends’ Facebook and Flickr photos
If you’re always doodling glasses and moustaches on celebrities’ faces in magazines, you’ll love Coolpic. This Chrome add-on lets you add cartoon extras to your friends’ Facebook or Flickr photos, which you can keep for your own amusement or share with others. Open an image, click the Coolpic option and you can drag headgear, facial hair, eyewear, props and speech bubbles onto the photo.
Hide messages in Facebook photos
Secretbook is a sneaky new Chrome add-on that lets you share private messages on Facebook by concealing them in photos (a technique known as steganography). When you’re viewing Facebook, press Ctrl+Alt+A to bring up the ‘Generate a Secretbook Image’ box. Select an image from your hard drive, type the text you want to hide and secure it with a password. Click ‘Create and download’, then upload the encrypted message and tell your password to selected friends. They’ll be able to read your secret message by pressing Ctrl+Alt+A and entering the password, while everyone else remains oblivious.
Make YouTube less annoying
YouTube is an excellent site, but it has lots of irrita ting elements. YouTube Options for Chrome lets you fix all manner of annoyances, such as annotations, adverts and videos playing automatically. You can easily change the video resolution and display size, and use your mouse wheel to make aimmediate changes, including turning the volume up or down. Although it ’s clearly designed for YouTube, the add-on will also work on most other video sites.
Turn YouTube into a cinema
If you find your enjoyment of watching web videos marred by comments, video recommendations and other distractions around the clip itself, you can use Turn Off The Lights in Chrome to darken the page around the video and make it seem like the screen in a (very small) cinema. Before you start playing the video, click the button and everything will dim. It won’t be a total blackout, so you’ll still be able to see the page around the window.
Force YouTube videos to play in HD
You can tell YouTube to always play videos in HD when you switch to full-screen view. Click the arrow next to your picture and go to YouTube Settings, then click the Playback link and tick ‘Always play HD on full screen (when available)’. However, this trick doesn’t always work, so you may prefer to install YouTube High Definition for Firefox, which lets you enjoy YouTube videos at the highest resolution available, or at a resolution of your choosing. Another useful Firefox add-on, YouTube All HTML5, lets you switch to HTML5 versions of videos with a single click.
BOOST WEBSITE SECURITY
Force websites into their secure versions
Most major websites, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, offer Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to prevent third parties from snooping on your web traffic. The HTTPS Everywhere extension (www.eff.org/https-everywhere) for Chrome and Firefox automatically takes you to the secure version of pages, and ensures you don’t accidentally go to an unencrypted page on the site. You can choose which services to use and even create your own sets of rules.
Prevent websites tracking you
Most modern web browsers have an option that lets you tell websites you don’t want to be tracked, but AVG Do Not Track fo r Chrome is a more advanced add-on. Go to any website and it will tell you what (if any) elements on the page are tracking you, including social buttons and web analytics. Click the browser button to block specific elements with a single click, or opttoblock them all. There’s also a settings screen that lets you block multiple ad networks. See our feature on page 54 to find out more about AVG’s latest tools.
Turn on two-step verification
To prevent unauthorised access to your Google account, you can protectit by setting up two-step verification (also known as two-factor authentication). This adds an extra layer of security to your account by sending a unique code to your phone, which you’ll need to use to log into your account alongside your usual email address and password. If you’re using a safe PC, such as your home computer, you can make this a one-time option so that only people on other devices will be asked for the code. To set up two-factor authentication for Google, go to. Facebook and Twitter also offer two-factor verification for your account. In Facebook, click the settings icon in the top-right corner, choose Account Settings and click Security. Click the Edit link next to 'Require a security code to access my account from unknown browsers’ and follow the instructions. In Twitter (which only added this feature in May), go to ‘Account settings’, click ‘Require a verification code when I sign in’ and click the link to add a phone
SIMPLE HACKS FOR WINDOWS
If you like Windows 7, but would like it even more if it looked, sounded and behaved the way you want it to, here are some tips for making it work the way you want.
Personalise your display
Right-click the Desktop, select Personalize and explore the Personalization window for creative ways to tweak your display. For example, you can change the background to a slideshow of your favourite photos; use application windows as screen savers; and change the colour and transparency of windows. The links on the left of the Personalization window offer lots more customisation options, including changing your mouse cursor, editing your display resolution and changing your account picture.
Customise your sounds
Ditch the default Windows bleeps for other sounds. Click ‘Change system sounds’ in the ‘Hardware and Sound’ section of the Control Panel and choose a new Sound Scheme from the drop-down box. Options include Sonata, which uses classical instruments, and Garden, which uses soothing outdoor sounds. You can match different events to different sounds and mix and match the schemes to fit your tastes.
Train Windows to behave
Rather than putting up with Windows’ annoying habits, change them. For example, if you don’t like the AutoPlay window that pops up when you plug in a device or disc, switch it off or change its default action in ‘Hardware and Sound’. Other system behaviour you can change in the Control Panel includes showing or hiding hidden folders and automatically opening file types in certain programs.
GET THE OLD WEB BACK
Websites, programs and browsers work hard to stay up-to-date, but you don’t always want them to. Here’s how to backdate rather than update.
Visit websites that are no longer online
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is a digital time capsule containing 250 billion working versions of old web pages going back to 1996. Whenever a web page is updated, a version is saved here for posterity. To start exploring the archive, type a URL into the Wayback Machine box on the Internet Archive homepage and choose a date from the calendar. Click a time to open the page as it was at that time on that date. Links on the archived pages still work if the linked page is also saved, though images and Flash content may no longer appear. It’s a useful and fascinating resource.
Switch back to a previous version
If you’d rather be running a previous version of your browser or other software, OldApps (www.oldapps.com) has a huge collection of current and previous incarnations, from AOL Instant Messenger to WinZip, and you can download any of them for free. New versions are added to the database as soon as they’re available, and all downloads are screened for malware and viruses. Programs are listed with release dates, system requirements and screenshots to help you choose the right version, and you can subscribe to updates about your favourite software. Be aware though, that older versions of software often aren’t as secure as the latest releases.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.