With Chrome 57, Google’s browser is less of a resource hog than it has been in the past. It achieves this efficiency by a new mechanism for throttling background tabs so they consume less power. Since updating to version 57 of Chrome, I have found I can let my open tabs grow to obscene numbers …
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No network? No problem for Google Docs on Firefox
If you use Google’s G Suite apps and Mozilla’s Firefox browser, good news: The two are going to get along much better. The G Suite tools for word processing, spreadsheets, Gmail and other chores have worked better on Google’s Chrome than on rival browsers in one important way: You can open and edit documents even when you don’t have a …
Read More »Why you should install Chrome on your laptop
For quite some time, Google Chrome has had a reputation: great browser, terrible performance. In particular, if you’re a laptop user and typically keep more than a few tabs open, expect hits to not only overall speed, but also battery life. Google has acknowledged this in the past, and in fact promised to make reducing power usage a “top priority …
Read More »Vivaldi wants to make your web browsing history useful
Where you’ve already been on the web turns out to be a pretty important predictor of where you’d like to go next. That’s why the next version of Vivaldi, a newer competitor to the likes of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, is putting browser history front and center. The new Vivaldi 1.8, due to arrive as soon as next week, …
Read More »How to print from a Chromebook
There’s no shortage of myths and misconceptions regarding Google’s Chrome OS. Most commonly found on a slew of Chromebooks, Chrome OS is more than a glorified browser. Under the hood, it offers file management, standalone apps, access to the Google Play Store and, yes, printing. To get started you’ll need to go through the Cloud Print process for the printer …
Read More »Turn off those pesky location requests in your Chrome, Firefox or Edge browser
It seems like more and more websites these days want to get a bead on you. You’ve no doubt seen the pop-ups: “XYZ-Site wants to know your location.” Then you have to click Allow or Block. In most cases this is an innocuous request, as determining your location is helpful (or even required) for things like calculating a shipping price …
Read More »5 games you can play on your MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar
The MacBook Pro‘s TouchBar can be useful within apps, providing shortcuts to extra functionality and features. However, there’s more to the tiny strip of touchscreen on Apple‘s MacBook Pro. Games! That’s right, the TouchBar is a gaming workhorse. Well, maybe that’s taking it a bit far, but you can play games on it. Some of the games below are posted …
Read More »Chrome now lets you scan QR codes
The iPhone has never had a built-in QR code scanner. That’s probably because it’s not every day (or every month) you scan a QR code spotted in the wild. Despite the dwindling popularity of QR codes — except for app-specific QR codes, like Snapchat’s Snapcodes — Chrome for iOS now makes it extra-easy to scan a QR code, should you …
Read More »Chrome, Firefox, Facebook work together for a faster web
Browser makers pay lots of attention to speeding up all the parts of loading a website — downloading a page’s programming instructions, running JavaScript code, pushing graphics and words to the screen — to spare us annoying waits. By contrast, refreshing a page you’ve already loaded seems pretty ho-hum. But programmers for Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browsers have been …
Read More »How to install Chrome extensions manually
Google has, over the years, increased its restrictions for installing third-party Chrome extensions to help protect Chrome users from malicious code. A few years ago, you could simply install an extension from a developer’s site without any hassle. Last year, you needed only to enable Developer mode before installing a CRX (Chrome extension) file. Now, according to Google, “to protect …
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