Best Chrome Apps 2014

Google Chrome is far more than just a hobbled Web-based operating system — it’s slowly inching its way toward being all the OS you could need. If you’ve recently purchased a Chromebook, the Chrome App Store can help you make the most out of Google’s platform. You can edit photos, play music, manage your finances and respond to emails — even when you’re offline. If you’re ready to step-up your Chrome experience, here are the apps you need to install now.

Have you ever wanted to learn a new language? Duolingo is the popular free application that's helping users learn a new way of communicating in their spare time. The Chrome app brings the platform off the smartphone and onto the desktop. Users can choose to study Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese or English, joining the ranks of the bilingual and beyond.

Install Duolingo

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Five free Chrome tools for faster, easier searches

Your search for the perfect search is over. Five free tools from the Chrome Web Store work with the Chrome browser to make searching easier, or help you tweak your search queries to minimize unwanted results. If you want to delve only into Wikipedia, or if you want to ignore certain sites—especially ones that seem suspect—you can do it with one of these helpers.

I’m lazy. I admit it. Sometimes, the idea of typing a query into a search engine is enough to discourage me from running a Web search altogether. But with Highlight to Search, I can embrace my laziness and still conduct the Web searches I need.

Highlight to Search adds your highlighted text to its search field, and then displays other suggestions based on the search term.

Once you've installed this Chrome extension, Highlight to Search lets you conduct searches for keywords you select on a webpage. Highlight a word or phrase, and Highlight to Search will display a small magnifying glass icon.

Click that, and you’ll see your highlighted phrase along with other search suggestions. Pick one, click again, and your search is complete: Highlight to Search opens a new tab, displaying Google’s search results for your query.

Searching doesn’t get any easier than that.

I resisted the allure of Wikipedia for a long time. It can’t be trusted, I said. It’s not reliable, I claimed. And now I’m over it.

Wikipedia Search displays its results in a drop-down window that lets you read them without leaving the page you're browsing.

Opening my mind to Wikipedia also opened the door to Wikipedia Search. This Chrome App and browser extension lets you search Wikipedia without leaving your current webpage.

Wikipedia Search displays images in easy-to-browse results.

All of the information you seek appears in a window that drops down from the Wikipedia Search icon added to your browser bar. The attractive and well-designed window includes images and links. You also have the option of clicking a button to view the Wikipedia page in a new browser tab.

Wikipedia Search isn’t perfect: On two occasions, it returned an error page in response to a basic search query. (In both instances, however, the error disappeared when I repeated my query.) Nevertheless, it remains a great way to dig up information from a vast trove of content without interrupting your browsing.

There's such a thing as TMI (too much information) in search, too. Say that you prefer the food reviews posted on Urbanspoon to those on Chow or Yelp. A reliable way to prevent sites that you don't want to read from surfacing in searches is to use Google’s own Personal Blocklist (by Google). Make no mistake: That's its name.

When future searches return results from sites you've blocked, Personal Blocklist lets you know with a message at the bottom of the page and a link to view those results.

This Chrome extension adds a link to all of your Google search results, so you can block search results from a given domain. Click it, and all such results disappear from view. The domain goes to your personal blocklist, which you can manage by clicking the Personal Blocklist icon added to your Chrome bar. Here, you can choose to block only subsets of certain domains, remove sites from your blocklist, or add others simply by typing them in.

When future searches return results from those sites, Google notifies you with a message at the bottom of the page and a link to view those results. Personal Blocklist (by Google) isn’t a universal cure to search-engine overload, but it is a handy way to tailor your results.

You know better than to trust everything you find on the Web, but distinguishing what you can trust from what you can’t is often difficult. To help you figure it out, WOT (a Chrome extension from the website reputation and review service) crowdsources the job.

WOT adds small traffic-light icons next to your search results, showing you how others regard each site.

WOT adds small icons next to search results that all major search engines return, along with links that appear on your social networks and Webmail services. The icons use the traffic-light scheme: Green means the site is widely considered to be reliable; yellow suggests that you should treat the site with caution; and red indicates that it may pose a security threat.

Clicking the icon takes you to WOT’s site. There you see more details about the site, and you can read what other users have to say about it. WOT allows you to add your own information about any site on the Web, just by clicking the WOT icon on to your Chrome menu bar.

WOT doesn’t guarantee your safety on the Web, but it does help you navigate its dangers with the help of thousands of cyber-friends.

One of my all-time favorite browser tools, the Google Toolbar, isn't available for Google Chrome. According to Google, that’s because many of the Google Toolbar's features are built into Chrome itself. Still, I miss having a toolbar, which is why I love SearchBar. This Chrome extension adds a customizable search toolbar to Chrome.

SearchBar is accessible via the small icon in your Chrome menu bar, or it can live at the top of your browser window permanently.

SearchBar adds a magnifying-glass icon to Chrome’s menu bar. Click it, and a search toolbar appears. For easier access to the toolbar, use the settings menu to create a custom key combination, or have it display whenever you're browsing. To use it, enter your query, and click the site you’d like to search.

Highlight text on the webpage, and SearchBar automatically adds it to the search field.

The default options are Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Wolfram Alpha, but you can customize the choices by using SearchBar’s settings menu. SearchBar lacks the slickness of Google’s own toolbar, which becomes its own part of your browser. But since Google Toolbar isn’t available for Chrome, SearchBar is the next best thing.

Anyone can type a search term into a text bar. But these five tools do more, helping you dig exactly what you want out of the search results more quickly and easily. And they're free, so you don't have to dig out your wallet at all.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
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Free Chrome extensions power up Gmail

Gmail offers powerful customization options even if you don’t install a single browser extension. You can switch keyboard shortcuts on and off, modify individual shortcuts, enable experimental features, and more.

But there are some things even Gmail’s extensive customization settings can’t do, and that’s where these free Chrome extensions shine. They range from gentle tweaks to a full-blown Gmail makeover. You decide how drastically you want to change Gmail.

Before changing Gmail or piling on the extensions, it’s a good idea to master what it can do straight out of the box. Keyboard shortcuts are one of Gmail’s best features: They let you compose, archive, forward, and reply to messages; move between labels; search; and more—all without reaching for your mouse.

Alas, they’re also hard to learn. After enabling keyboard shortcuts in the Settings screen, you can press the question-mark key on your keyboard to summon a semi-transparent overlay listing all shortcuts. But for many of us, looking at a long list isn’t the best way to learn—and KeyRocket for Gmail thinks it can do better.

Every time you use the mouse to do something your keyboard can do, KeyRocket for Gmail lets you know the keyboard shortcut.

KeyRocket sits in the background as you use Gmail and quietly watches your every move. As soon as you tick the checkbox next to a message, up pops a discreet notification informing you that you could have just pressed the X key on your keyboard to do the same thing. When you click the Reply button, KeyRocket informs you that pressing R on your keyboard would have worked just as well. Because the messages are contextual, they are much more useful than a help sheet: You learn in bite-size chunks, and only about those functions you actually use.

KeyRocket makes key combinations easy to learn.

The one shortcoming to this contextual coaching is that KeyRocket doesn’t learn as it watches you. It should be able to tell when you already know a shortcut and just prefer using the mouse every once in a while. For example, if I type the pound-symbol key (#) to delete a message most of the time, KeyRocket shouldn’t tell me about the ‘#’ shortcut every time I break from routine and use the mouse. Despite this minor flaw, however, KeyRocket is an excellent learning aid for Gmail.

Most emails consist of just plain text, although Gmail’s excellent message editor lets you do some formatting without reaching for the mouse (press Ctrl-K to insert a link, for instance). But sometimes you may want to use a bit of extra formatting—like, say, for a headline. Or perhaps you often email code snippets and would like to use some automatic syntax coloring. Markdown Here is an unobtrusive extension that lets you use the popular Markdown plain-text-to-HTML converter within Gmail to convert your text into well-formed HTML.

Markdown Here offers fine-grained settings for controlling the CSS that’s included with your formatted emails.

With Markdown Here, you can write an email using Markdown, and then press Ctrl-Alt-M and watch it transform into a beautiful, richly formatted message. You can apply syntax highlighting to code listings, use multiple levels of headlines, and more. Don’t like the formatting? Press the Markdown shortcut again (Ctrl-Alt-M), and your email reverts to plain text so that you can tweak it.

To format any Markdown text as HTML, simply select it, right-click, and click Markdown Toggle.

You can also use Markdown Here when replying to an email: Just highlight the part of the message you wish to format with Markdown, and press the key combination. That combination doesn’t have to be Markdown’s Ctrl-Alt-M; I like to use just Alt-M, and Markdown Here lets me customize that. And if you often email code snippets, you can even pick one of several themes for syntax-highlighted code.

Note that adding HTML and CSS to email messages can cause problems with some email clients, so if you’re using this for a mailing list, offer a plain-text version as well.

When I send an email, I often want to be reminded if the recipient hasn’t replied within a few days. Follow-up, unfortunately, is a feature that Gmail lacks. That’s why I was so happy to find Right Inbox for Gmail.

Right Inbox for Gmail makes it easy to specify when you want to be reminded of an email, and whether or not you want to track it.

Right Inbox for Gmail is just one option in a highly competitive market of email-reminder and follow-up services. There’s Boomerang, which is pretty costly if you’re using Google Apps ($15 per month). Followup.cc is client-agnostic, but that also means it doesn’t integrate into Gmail. Right Inbox for Gmail offers seamless integration and an affordable price. This $5-per-month service adds a couple of new buttons that blend in well with Gmail’s native ones. Click them, and presto: You can now follow up on and track emails.

When composing a new email, just click the Remind Me button to set a follow-up time. Right Inbox for Gmail offers several preconfigured times, ranging from a set number of hours to ‘tomorrow morning’ or ‘tomorrow afternoon’. You can’t configure your own favorite intervals (one of the service’s few annoyances), but you can pick other intervals using a calendar pop-up.

When a recipient opens your tracked email, Right Inbox for Gmail sends you a detailed report including the recipient’s location and IP address.

Right Inbox for Gmail also lets you schedule emails to be sent automatically at a later time.

You can also set email tracking to notify you when a recipient opens an email. Tracking uses a small, invisible image embedded into the email, so it works only if the recipient opts to display images included with the email (many email clients don’t display images by default).

Email notifications are like coffee: Some people can’t stand them, while others are addicted and even use notifications to wake them up in the morning. Those in the latter camp may like Checker Plus for Gmail. Like every other mail checker, it lets you know when new emails arrive ... but that’s where other email checkers stop and Checker Plus is just getting started.

Checker Plus for Gmail can read email notifications aloud—not a feature you’d want to use in a crowded office.

Checker Plus lives as a small button on the Chrome toolbar, showing a tiny unread message counter. Click the button, and a complete, working mini-Gmail interface pops up over the current window. You can view your inbox, archive messages, directly open them, and more.

Checker Plus also shows a pop-up window whenever a new email comes in. The pop-up includes the basic details of the email so you can decide whether to respond now or later. It can also chime an alert and read aloud some information about the email, so you know what it’s about even if you aren’t looking at your Web browser. By default, the read-aloud option is enabled only if your keyboard is inactive for a short period of time (you can adjust the interval).

Checker Plus lets you customize everything from the notification icon’s theme to the way summaries are formatted in the notifications.

Checker Plus’s rich customization options let you choose how you wish to be alerted (or interrupted). You can enable or disable chimes, text-to-speech, and pop-up notifications. You can set alerts for specific email labels, select a color scheme for the pop-up notifications, and even tweak the appearance of the toolbar icons in minute detail. It’s one of the most configurable Chrome extensions I’ve seen yet. Nevertheless, it’s still an email notifier, which can be as distracting as it is helpful.

All the extensions discussed so far sit on top of Gmail’s regular Web interface—some invisibly (like Markdown Here), and some subtly (like Right Inbox). If you were looking over someone’s shoulder while they used Gmail, you could easily miss them. This next one, however, might cause a few double-takes: Gmail Offline, an extension by Google, puts a completely different face on Gmail—one that resembles the Android tablet version.

Even if you’re working while connected, you may appreciate Gmail Offline’s clean, uncluttered looks.

To me, Gmail Offline is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, the extension lets you use Gmail without an Internet connection: When you’re offline, you can read your mail and write replies in an Outbox, where the messages are saved and then sent as soon as you’re connected. But that’s not the most noticeable thing about the extension.

Gmail Offline looks nothing like Gmail. It features a dual-pane interface, where you can toggle the left pane to show either messages or labels, while the right side shows the current thread, so you can move quickly between email conversations. This split view is now available on Gmail’s regular Web interface, but the aesthetic is completely different. Whereas the regular Gmail is flat and minimalistic, the Offline version is much more colorful, with subtle gradients and large, chunky buttons.

Gmail Offline can either be used as an alternative Gmail interface while connected, or as an offline client.

The regular version of Gmail supports far more shortcuts than Gmail Offline, but many of the essentials are here: You can compose a new message, reply, forward, archive, and more—all using the keyboard. Most of the shortcuts that are missing are for functions that Gmail Offline doesn’t have, such as chat.

Overall, Gmail Offline is an excellent addition to the regular Gmail client, and a new way to use a tool you probably depend on every day.

No matter how much you love Gmail, it could always do more for you...and with one or more of these helpers, it will. If you want a streamlined, offline-friendly Gmail, Gmail Offline is a good pick. Markdown Here enhances the look of the emails you send, and Right Inbox for Gmail tracks them. Checker Plus for Gmail alerts you to incoming missives. If you spend a little time with Keyrocket for Gmail, however, you may soon find you don’t need any more extensions at all.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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How to Set Up Chrome Remote Desktop on Your Chromebook

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Review: Angry Birds for Pokki lets you play the Chrome version on your desktop

While known best for its mobile versions, Angry Birds is also available for Windows, but with its 50MB+ installer, a lengthy installation process, and a full-screen game that's hard even for medium-strength computers to haul, Angry Birds for Windows is not the best choice if you want to actually enjoy the game. Angry Birds for Pokki, however, is a delightful discovery, bringing the Angry Birds Chrome experience right to your desktop.

With one click, you can start playing dozens of levels of Angry Birds using half the RAM the full Windows version does, and with surprising responsiveness, even in full-screen mode. Since this is actually the Chrome version of Angry Birds, you need to sign in with your Google account in order to play most of the levels, and the available levels are mostly special holiday ones...but these include all the cool birds, all the mad piggies, and even the Mighty Eagle. The game is ad-supported, but you can get rid of the ads forever for $4.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system. You will need the Pokki platform to run it.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Review: Angry Birds for Pokki lets you play the Chrome version on your desktop

While known best for its mobile versions, Angry Birds is also available for Windows, but with its 50MB+ installer, a lengthy installation process, and a full-screen game that's hard even for medium-strength computers to haul, Angry Birds for Windows is not the best choice if you want to actually enjoy the game. Angry Birds for Pokki, however, is a delightful discovery, bringing the Angry Birds Chrome experience right to your desktop.

With one click, you can start playing dozens of levels of Angry Birds using half the RAM the full Windows version does, and with surprising responsiveness, even in full-screen mode. Since this is actually the Chrome version of Angry Birds, you need to sign in with your Google account in order to play most of the levels, and the available levels are mostly special holiday ones...but these include all the cool birds, all the mad piggies, and even the Mighty Eagle. The game is ad-supported, but you can get rid of the ads forever for $4.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system. You will need the Pokki platform to run it.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Review: Angry Birds for Pokki lets you play the Chrome version on your desktop

While known best for its mobile versions, Angry Birds is also available for Windows, but with its 50MB+ installer, a lengthy installation process, and a full-screen game that's hard even for medium-strength computers to haul, Angry Birds for Windows is not the best choice if you want to actually enjoy the game. Angry Birds for Pokki, however, is a delightful discovery, bringing the Angry Birds Chrome experience right to your desktop.

With one click, you can start playing dozens of levels of Angry Birds using half the RAM the full Windows version does, and with surprising responsiveness, even in full-screen mode. Since this is actually the Chrome version of Angry Birds, you need to sign in with your Google account in order to play most of the levels, and the available levels are mostly special holiday ones...but these include all the cool birds, all the mad piggies, and even the Mighty Eagle. The game is ad-supported, but you can get rid of the ads forever for $4.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system. You will need the Pokki platform to run it.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet

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Chrome 21 is a browser built more for speed than style

The designers of high-end sports cars often strip their cars of every inessential component, just to coax the greatest power and speed from their creations. Google’s Chrome reminds me of those speed demons: It lacks the fit and finish of Apple’s Safari (), but man, does it ever burn (virtual) rubber.

Built for speed

I’m not sure which is faster: Chrome itself, or the browser’s development cycle. To watch the version numbers blur by, you’d expect big changes in the browser’s look and feel. But on startup, Chrome 21 looks a lot like last year’s Chrome 8, right down to the annoyingly persistent rough edges on its interface.

You still can’t open all the bookmarks in a given folder without awkwardly right-clicking, selecting a command from a contextual menu, and clicking OK in a nagging dialogue box. You can’t switch into privacy-protecting Incognito mode on the fly, but instead must open an entire new window. When you navigate back and forth, pages don’t so much slide as simply appear. These are minor details, for certain, but their absence suggests that Google’s coders care more about the technical side of their browser than the way it interacts with humans.

Unpolished UI: Chrome’s interface hasn’t changed much from earlier versions, and often lacks the small, thoughtful touches you’ll find in Safari.

Chrome 21 contains one definite and laudable exception to that theory, though: its support for Apple’s VoiceOver, which makes browsing easier for the visually impaired. Last year, Google promised to improve its then-lackluster integration in future versions, and it’s since delivered. VoiceOver support still isn’t perfect; I could only get it to recognize the first link in any of the folders on the Bookmarks Bar, but I could accurately and easily navigate pages in Chrome via keyboard or mouse, with my Mac speaking each section aloud. Kudos to Google for this considerate, useful improvement.

Indeed, most of Chrome’s notable additions have been made under the hood. The browser fully supports Lion’s Full Screen mode—which coexists somewhat awkwardly with Chrome’s own, functionally identical Presentation Mode. Also, despite Google’s stated intention last year to ditch H.264 video support in favor of its own WebM codec, Chrome still appears to play both types of HTML5 video.

Rather than worry too much about their browser’s chassis, Google’s team seems to have focused almost entirely on its engine, with impressive results.

Top Tier: Chrome posts the highest score for HTML5 standards compliance of any Mac browser.

Hot rod browser

For HTML5 standards compliance and raw JavaScript performance, no Mac browser beats Chrome. In tests on a 2GHz aluminum MacBook with 2GB of RAM, Chrome smoked the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera (), and Maxthon () (essentially a Chrome clone) in both categories.

In Google’s own V8 JavaScript benchmark suite, Chrome’s score beat that of every other browser by at least 25 percent. Even in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Chrome edged out Firefox for the fastest time, trouncing the others by even wider margins.

And Chrome downright embarrassed the competition in HTML5Test.com’s check of standards compliance. Its score of 431 (plus 13 bonus points) out of 500 exceeded its nearest rival, Opera 12, by 41 points, with the rest of the pack trailing considerably farther behind.

However, when it came to actual HTML horsepower, Chrome fell surprisingly short. Its score in an HTML5 vector graphics test beat Firefox’s handily, but still totaled less than half Safari’s mark. It ran about 19 percent slower than the leading scores in HTML5 bitmap graphics, and placed fourth after Safari, Opera, and Firefox in HTML5 text handling—albeit by a narrower gap.

In regular use, Chrome felt generally fast, responsive, and fun to use, on par with its latest competitors.

BrowserHTML5 VectorHTML5 BitmapHTML5 TextV8SunSpiderAcid3HTML5 ComplianceBest results in bold. Reference browsers are in italics. HTML5 Vector, Bitmap, and Text test results are in frames per second; higher is better. The V8 Benchmark Suite test results are scores; higher is better. The SunSpider JavaScript results are in milliseconds; shorter times are better. The Acid3 result is a score out of 100. HTML5 Compliance is a score out of 500.

Bottom line

If you like to browse without frivolous bells and whistles, or need first-rate JavaScript performance, Chrome is the browser for you. What it lacks in surface refinements, it more than makes up for in raw power.

[Nathan Alderman is a writer, editor, and occasional Top Gear viewer in Alexandria, Va.]

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Chrome Extension Readability Helps You Format Pages to Your Liking

Even after you replace all Flash objects with placeholders, it may not be easy to sit down and focus on a lengthy read. Perhaps the article loaded with distracting banners, maybe the font size is too small, or perhaps you'd rather curl up in an easy chair to read it. Readability is an elegant service that can solve all of these problems, and more.

Readability's Chrome extension converts busy Web pages to elegant, easy-to-read text.Much like its Firefox sibling, Readability's Chrome extension shows up as a simple button. Click the button, and you can opt to read the article now, read it later, or send it to your Kindle. If you choose to read it now, Readability extracts just the text and images for the article and displays them on a distraction-free page with large, attractive typography. You can customize the colors, width, and font size, and even hide images and convert all links to footnotes.

Choosing to read the article later adds it to your reading list, which you can access on the Readability website. And once you configure your Kindle to receive emails from Readability, sending articles to read from the comfort of your e-ink screen takes just one click.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Erez Zukerman

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God Game From Dust Lives Again as Chrome Web Store Centerpiece

PC fans of God games had plenty to be excited about when publisher Ubisoft announced From Dust for PC last year. The game's designer, Eric Chani, is well known for his abstract early 90's masterpiece Another World, so the project seemed in capable hands. Moreover, he cited Peter Molyneux's classics Populous and Black & White as his primary influences, so the provenance couldn't be better. After a successful console release, it seemed little could go wrong. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. The PC port was badly botched with low framerates, no anti-aliasing support, video card compatibility issues and an overzealous DRM system riddled with bugs that plague users to this day. There's an alternative to the console version if you want to play frustration-free, however. Just fire up Chrome and play right in your browser, courtesy of From Dust in Chrome's Web Store ($10).

With these totems taken care of, things are looking green and leafy around this From Dust village.From Dust is the second high-profile game title ported to Chrome using Google's Native Client technology; the first was Bastion. Native Client allows legacy software to run inside the highly secure browser framework at near-native speeds with virtually no porting required. With support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, mouse capture, fullscreen modes and more, it's a natural fit for resource-intensive games which see little performance degradation compared to their native, traditionally installed counterparts. What's more, the nature of this cloud-based gaming model eliminates issues arising from Ubisoft's disastrous UPlay DRM scheme. There is no need to install special software or make players jump through verification hoops. You just fire it up and play. It even works on both Linux and Mac OSX.

The game itself is a slickly executed take on the genre's classics. You play a god-like presence guiding a race of people to success and happiness via environmental manipulation, using a ball-shaped manifestation of force called "the breath." Using that ball as a cursor, you raise and lower land, redirect the flow of rivers and lakes, create paths for your people to follow to safety and more. The action is smooth, satisfying and easy to pick up. As your power grows, so do the effects you can create, which include the ability to manipulate lava, smother fires and redirect deadly floods to help your villagers thrive. Be careful, however, as performing miracles is tricky work. An imprecise wiggle of the mouse can wind up incinerating or drowning your villagers instead of saving them. When you're a god, there's a fine line between saving and smiting.

Ubisoft's From Dust for Chrome has pretty spiffy visuals for a browser-based game.Since From Dust's code has been transported largely intact, some of the original's problems remain. Foremost of these is the absence of an actual sandbox mode, a baffling omission given the near-requirement of such an option for this type of game. Related to this is a creeping feeling of pointlessness as each stage's goal becomes the reason for play, rather than the simple, open-ended enjoyment of developing your people to their full potential. The various level challenges play out like RTS puzzles, and while this is fun at first, it's easy to become detached enough from the proceedings that they start feeling like busywork. Populous had the novelty of a new idea and Black & White had its giant avatars to provide personality and a sense of occasion. From Dust is devoid of such flourishes, and while this doesn't ruin gameplay, it does prevent an otherwise good game from becoming a great one. On a more mundane note, anti-aliasing is also absent in this version and remains implementable only via FXAA injection tricks with Nvidia graphics cards .

RTS and God-game fans will nevertheless find plenty to like here, as titles of this flavor and quality don't come along very often. The best part is the price. At $10, Chrome's version of From Dust is the cheapest you'll find short of a holiday fire sale, and the browser-based delivery method is akin to getting a bugfix update for free. There are updated keyboard controls, new tutorials and much needed screen controls all absent in the PC version. There's even a fully playable three-level demo. Check it out, even just to see what Google's Native Client and Chrome are capable of pulling off.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Jim Norris

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Look up Word Definitions Easily With the Dictionary.com Chrome Extension

Dictionary.com Extension is for everyone who isn't blessed with a memory like the Oxford English Dictionary. If definitions don't instantly and effortlessly spring to mind and you need an authoritative reference source to look up a word without a lot of extra clicking, check out this free and useful Google Chrome browser extension. It makes the whole word definition search a breeze without having to go to the Dictionary.com site itself.

Highlight a word on the webpage and it will appear in the search box along with its definition.When you install the Dictionary.com extension, a small box will appear in the top bar of your Google Chrome browser. This is your Dictionary.com search box and it is the first way you can use the extension. Simply type the word you don't know into the box and your definition will appear, as if by magic.

The second way you can use this Chrome extension is to highlight a word on any webpage and then click on the small box in the top bar. The highlighted word will already be in the Dictionary.com search bar along with the definition underneath. Impressed?

The third way to use the Dictionary.com Chrome extension is to highlight the word on the webpage and right-click with your mouse. You will see an option in the right-click menu that invites you to view the highlighted word on Dictionary.com, and this is the one time where you are actually taken offsite to Dictionary.com to see the word definition.

Dictionary.com extension for Google Chrome works as advertised. The search button is small and unobtrusive, and the extension is useful to all budding linguists.

If you find yourself looking up dictionary definitions all day, then I highly recommend installing this free extension to save yourself some time and inconvenience. Afterwards, you'll wonder how you survived without it.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Mark O'Neill

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Simplify the Web with these free Chrome extensions

A Web page can be a busy place. Numerous elements vie for your attention. Animated banners, comment threads, buttons, and options you never use all conspire to detract from whatever you're trying to read or view. It doesn't have to be that way: Below are four free Google Chrome extensions that give the Web some breathing room. By stripping away extraneous content or highlighting what's important, these utilities will help to make your browsing more peaceful and focused.

(For links to all of these Chrome extensions in one convenient list, see our "Simplify the Web with these indispensable Chrome extensions" collection.)

FlashControl

HTML5 is slowly replacing Adobe Flash, but many websites still use Flash for videos, banners, and games. Flash videos and animations consume resources, and may even make your browser unresponsive. And of course, they also move and bounce around, sometimes making it difficult for you to focus.

FlashControl offers a simple solution, allowing you to enable Flash selectively. After you install it, Flash elements show a simple static placeholder by default. Click the placeholder, and the Flash content loads and starts playing. FlashControl also lets you whitelist websites, so you can enable Flash on Vimeo, YouTube, and other sites on which it is essential.

If you wish, you can dig deeply into FlashControl's preferences: The default configuration interface is simple, with only a handful of options. Switch on the Advanced interface, and new tabs and options suddenly appear, permitting you to customize the extension as much as you want, right down to changing the placeholder color.

Readability

Even after you replace Flash objects with placeholders, sitting down at your desk and focusing on a lengthy read might prove challenging. Maybe the article has distracting banners, or the font size is too small, or you'd rather curl up in an easy chair to read the article. Readability is an elegant service that can solve all of those problems and more.

Readability's Chrome extension appears as a simple button. Click the button, and you can opt to read the article now, read it later, or send it to your Kindle. If you choose to read it now, Readability extracts just the text and images for the article and displays them on a distraction-free page with large, attractive typography. You can customize the colors, width, and font size, and even hide images and convert links to footnotes.

Choosing to read the article later adds it to your reading list, which you can access on the Readability website. And once you configure your Kindle to receive email from Readability, sending articles to read on your electronic-ink screen takes just one click.

Gmelius

Web apps can be distracting, too. Sporting numerous buttons and options you may never use, Gmail's rich interface is a prime example. To be fair, Google packs a lot of functionality into the Gmail interface, but no interface is perfect for 100 percent of its users. Gmelius is a simple Chrome extension that lets you determine which features to display, as well as how you want to use them.

Gmelius's interface consists of a long list of settings with checkboxes, but it's divided into sensible sections and gets the job done. With one click, you can hide Gmail's top bar, and toggle it back by pressing the slash key (/) when you're in Gmail. Another click moves the labels to the right side of the email line, and yet another adds icons to email threads showing the types of attachments they contain. Gmelius also permits you to remove ads from Gmail, as well as to homogenize the formatting of incoming email so that even if someone writes you a message in, say, Comic Sans, it shows up in Gmail's default font.

Magic Actions for YouTube

YouTube offers an endless supply of excellent videos, but its interface leaves much to be desired. For instance, you have no way to stop videos from playing automatically as soon as the page loads. If you want to watch a high-resolution version of a video, you must select it from the video menu each and every time. And on top of that, each page is full of distracting elements such as comments and video recommendations. Chrome extension Magic Actions for YouTube lets you fix all sorts of issues.

With Magic Actions for YouTube, you can customize just about any aspect of your interaction with the video site. You can stop videos from playing instantly as you load the page, automatically pick the highest resolution available (or a resolution of your choice), automatically use a wide player, and more. You select customizations using a simple interface that consists mainly of checkboxes.

Magic Actions for YouTube also shows up as a bar under all videos on YouTube, so you can easily access its settings and see what percentage of the current video has buffered so far. It lets you hide page sections, too—so if you don't like the comment threads on YouTube, you can make them all go away.

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Enable Flash in Chrome Only When You Want It With FlashControl

Adobe Flash is slowly being replaced with HTML5, but many websites still use Flash for videos, banners, and games. Flash videos and animations take up resources, and may even make your browser unresponsive. And of course, they also move and bounce around, sometimes making it difficult to focus on what you're trying to read. FlashControl (free) offers a simple solution, letting you selectively enable Flash in Google Chrome.

FlashControl makes it easy to enable or disable Flash in Google Chrome.By default, Flash elements show a simple static placeholder. Click the placeholder, and the Flash content loads and starts playing. FlashControl also lets you whitelist websites, so you can enable Flash on Vimeo, YouTube, and other websites on which it is essential.

FlashControl lets you decide how deep you want to dig into its preferences: The default configuration interface is very simple, with only a handful of options. Switch on the Advanced interface, and new tabs and options suddenly appear, letting you deeply customize the extension, right down to changing the placeholder color.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Erez Zukerman

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God Game From Dust Lives Again as Chrome Web Store Centerpiece

PC fans of God games had plenty to be excited about when publisher Ubisoft announced From Dust for PC last year. The game's designer, Eric Chani, is well known for his abstract early 90's masterpiece Another World, so the project seemed in capable hands. Moreover, he cited Peter Molyneux's classics Populous and Black & White as his primary influences, so the provenance couldn't be better. After a successful console release, it seemed little could go wrong. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. The PC port was badly botched with low framerates, no anti-aliasing support, video card compatibility issues and an overzealous DRM system riddled with bugs that plague users to this day. There's an alternative to the console version if you want to play frustration-free, however. Just fire up Chrome and play right in your browser, courtesy of From Dust in Chrome's Web Store ($10).

With these totems taken care of, things are looking green and leafy around this From Dust village.From Dust is the second high-profile game title ported to Chrome using Google's Native Client technology; the first was Bastion. Native Client allows legacy software to run inside the highly secure browser framework at near-native speeds with virtually no porting required. With support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, mouse capture, fullscreen modes and more, it's a natural fit for resource-intensive games which see little performance degradation compared to their native, traditionally installed counterparts. What's more, the nature of this cloud-based gaming model eliminates issues arising from Ubisoft's disastrous UPlay DRM scheme. There is no need to install special software or make players jump through verification hoops. You just fire it up and play. It even works on both Linux and Mac OSX.

The game itself is a slickly executed take on the genre's classics. You play a god-like presence guiding a race of people to success and happiness via environmental manipulation, using a ball-shaped manifestation of force called "the breath." Using that ball as a cursor, you raise and lower land, redirect the flow of rivers and lakes, create paths for your people to follow to safety and more. The action is smooth, satisfying and easy to pick up. As your power grows, so do the effects you can create, which include the ability to manipulate lava, smother fires and redirect deadly floods to help your villagers thrive. Be careful, however, as performing miracles is tricky work. An imprecise wiggle of the mouse can wind up incinerating or drowning your villagers instead of saving them. When you're a god, there's a fine line between saving and smiting.

Ubisoft's From Dust for Chrome has pretty spiffy visuals for a browser-based game.Since From Dust's code has been transported largely intact, some of the original's problems remain. Foremost of these is the absence of an actual sandbox mode, a baffling omission given the near-requirement of such an option for this type of game. Related to this is a creeping feeling of pointlessness as each stage's goal becomes the reason for play, rather than the simple, open-ended enjoyment of developing your people to their full potential. The various level challenges play out like RTS puzzles, and while this is fun at first, it's easy to become detached enough from the proceedings that they start feeling like busywork. Populous had the novelty of a new idea and Black & White had its giant avatars to provide personality and a sense of occasion. From Dust is devoid of such flourishes, and while this doesn't ruin gameplay, it does prevent an otherwise good game from becoming a great one. On a more mundane note, anti-aliasing is also absent in this version and remains implementable only via FXAA injection tricks with Nvidia graphics cards .

RTS and God-game fans will nevertheless find plenty to like here, as titles of this flavor and quality don't come along very often. The best part is the price. At $10, Chrome's version of From Dust is the cheapest you'll find short of a holiday fire sale, and the browser-based delivery method is akin to getting a bugfix update for free. There are updated keyboard controls, new tutorials and much needed screen controls all absent in the PC version. There's even a fully playable three-level demo. Check it out, even just to see what Google's Native Client and Chrome are capable of pulling off.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Jim Norris

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Chrome Extension Readability Helps You Format Pages to Your Liking

Even after you replace all Flash objects with placeholders, it may not be easy to sit down and focus on a lengthy read. Perhaps the article loaded with distracting banners, maybe the font size is too small, or perhaps you'd rather curl up in an easy chair to read it. Readability is an elegant service that can solve all of these problems, and more.

Readability's Chrome extension converts busy Web pages to elegant, easy-to-read text.Much like its Firefox sibling, Readability's Chrome extension shows up as a simple button. Click the button, and you can opt to read the article now, read it later, or send it to your Kindle. If you choose to read it now, Readability extracts just the text and images for the article and displays them on a distraction-free page with large, attractive typography. You can customize the colors, width, and font size, and even hide images and convert all links to footnotes.

Choosing to read the article later adds it to your reading list, which you can access on the Readability website. And once you configure your Kindle to receive emails from Readability, sending articles to read from the comfort of your e-ink screen takes just one click.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Erez Zukerman

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Vimium Grants Chrome Hotkey Superpowers

Keyboard shortcuts take some getting used to, but offer a rewarding productivity boost for those willing to stick through the initial learning curve. Vimium is a Google Chrome extension that takes this mindset and runs with it, bolting a rich set of keyboard shortcuts on top of Chrome. Shortcuts are inspired by the Vim text editor, but can be remapped as needed. You can use Vimium to switch tabs, click links, select text boxes, and more, all without reaching for the mouse.

Tapping ? pops up a semi-transparent overlay listing all Vimium shortcut keys.Vim fans using Firefox can opt for either Vimperator or Pentadactyl. These two Firefox add-ons transform the Firefox interface, stripping away much of the UI chrome and leaving you with a very minimal browser packing lots of hidden shortcut keys. Vimium, by contrast, leaves the Google Chrome user interface unchanged, and doesn't even add a button to the toolbar. In other words, if you don't already know it's there, you may not even notice it. This is nice if you share Chrome with another user who likes the default interface and uses the mouse and built-in keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Some of the functionality Vimium provides is already baked into Chrome. For example, you can use Vimium to switch tabs using gt (switch to the next tab) and gT (switch to the previous one), but Chrome already has Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn for that. The same goes for H, "go back in history,” which is provided by Backspace by default. Fortunately, the default Chrome shortcuts keep on working with Vimium installed. Also, Chrome has no shortcut for "go forward"; Vimium does (L, by default).

Hints let you open any link using 3-4 keystrokes.Vimium shines when it comes to more complicated features. For example, hit ]] (closing bracket, twice) to switch to the next page on a list of search results. Hitting [[ will take you to the previous page. And if you want to open links without using the mouse, just tap f: Every link on the screen will be tagged with a little label bearing two or three letters. Type those letters, and the link instantly opens. If you want the link to open in a background tab, start by typing F (Shift+f) instead of f. This is similar to the way old Firefox add-on Hit-a-Hint worked.

Vimium’s Options screen is not fancy, but it is powerful.Ironically, one of the main things holding Vimium back is Google's own fondness of Vim-like keyboard shortcuts. Many Google services, such as Gmail, Google Reader, and even the YouTube Flash video player, feature their own set of keyboard shortcuts. Many of these shortcuts overlap Vimium's, which means Vimium must be disabled on those websites. This can make for a jarring user experience: Use gT to flip between tabs until you get to a tab that contains a Gmail session ... and then you're stuck. The shortcut just stops working, because Vimium is disabled for that tab. By default, Vimium doesn't work on Gmail and Google Reader, and you can add other sites to the list.

The two main features that make Vimium attractive are being able to quickly open links and advance to the next page in a paginated article using just the keyboard. If these are things you've always wanted to do, take Vimium for a spin—you may like its other features, too.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can install the latest version of the software directly into your Chrome browser.

—Erez Zukerman

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