The Firefox add-on and Google Chrome extension ProxMate looks and feels like an advanced copy of the Grooveshark Unlocker, an extension that unblocks access to the Grooveshark site if it is blocked in a country.

The browser add-on adds two features on top of that make it more practicable. It first can unblock blocked videos on YouTube, so that they become accessible again. It detects blocked contents on YouTube Video pages, channels and search, enables the proxy and reloads the page to unblock the contents on the site.

The second new feature allows users to change the proxy server. This can be useful for privacy reasons, and in situations where the default proxy server may have been blocked or is not functioning anymore.

ProxMate works right after you have installed it in the Firefox web browser. Instead of seeing a screen like the following one that is telling you that you cannot watch the video,

you can watch it just fine with ProxMate enabled.

Please note that while this works automatically most of the time, you sometimes may need to reload the page a few times before the video starts to play.

You can change the proxy server in the settings. Here it is also possible to disable the add-ons functionality on select supported sites.

ProxMate is available for Firefox and Google Chrome. The extension can be useful if you like to access the Grooveshark website or encounter videos on YouTube regularly that are blocked in your country.

Update: Grooveshark Updater also came with options to change the proxy server in the add-on’s settings.

The new version introduces GPU accelerated 2D Canvas on Mac and Windows versions of the browser, which according to Google should improve the performance of 2D browser apps and games using the HTML5 technology noticeably.

Chrome users can open the internal page chrome://gpu to check their computer’s graphics feature status. The page lists five features and their hardware acceleration status.

The Swiftshader software 3D rendering technology has been licensed by Google and implemented into the Google Chrome Beta browser to improve the performance of 3D contents on older graphics processing units that do not support GPU based hardware acceleration. While not performing as well as GPU based acceleration, it should boost the performance on systems that were unsupported until now.

At the same time, we recognize that many people with older GPUs and graphics drivers have not been able to experience the rich content provided by technologies such as WebGL. Chrome is now able to display 3D content via SwiftShader, a software rasterizer we licensed from TransGaming, Inc. Although SwiftShader won’t perform as well as a real GPU, it will be an improvement for many of our users on older operating systems such as Windows XP.

The Swiftshader software rasterizer will automatically take over on systems that do not support gpu hardware acceleration. Chrome users who would like to see performance information can start the browser with the following two flags:

• –blacklist-accelerated-compositing
• –blacklist-webgl

Chrome will then download Swiftshader components to the computer to make them available. This can take a few minutes. Some users have even reported that the process is stuck on their system, with no option to get the components to download properly. You can remove the flags later on.

Chrome Beta users should have received the update to version 18 by now. Interested users who want to download the beta version can do so at the Beta channel over at the Google website. (via)

Omnibox Prerendering basically preloads some of the pages that are presented to you in the browser’s address bar. This reduces the time between hitting the Enter key on the keyboard and seeing the page fully rendered in the browser window. It is not clear how Chrome selects those pages, but it is likely that your previous browsing history and bookmarks may have something to do with it. This does create some overhead though, especially if the browser does not select the right pages that often.

Chrome users who do not want or need the prerendering feature can disable it in the following way:

• Open chrome://flags/ in the Chrome address bar and hit enter.
• Locate the flag Prerender from omnibox and change the feature’s state to disabled.



The second new feature is the automatic scanning of executable files like exe or msi in Chrome to warn you if you are downloading a malicious file or a file from a host that is know to host a high percentage of malicious downloads.

Google maintains a whitelist of files that are not checked. All other files are checked with Google to retrieve more information. While not a fail safe approach, it can warn users if they are about to download known malicious files. The concept looks similar to Microsoft’s SmartScreen Filter. It does not seem possible to disable the feature right now in the browser.

In addition, a total of 20 security vulnerabilities were closed in Chrome 17 of which one received the highest possible severity rating of critical.

You can read up on the changes at the official Chrome Release blog. Chrome updates should already been applied to existing Chrome Stable installations. You can verify the version with a click on Wrench > About Google Chrome. There you can also download and apply the update if the browser has not been updated yet.

The browser add-on, available for both the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browser, monitors all browser tabs automatically from the moment it has been installed. It cannot notify you of updates if a website is closed though, which means that it is best for users who have their messaging and social sites up whenever the browser is up and running.

Tab Notifier can display notifications even if the browser is minimized or not visible on the screen.

The extension watches all open tabs but the active tab by default. This behavior can be modified in the extension options to a more stricter policy. Instead of watching all sites, it is possible to configure the add-on to watch only sites listed in the settings window.

Notifications furthermore can be configured to close automatically after a set amount of seconds, which may be useful for users who receive many throughout the day.

A right-click on a web page and the selection of the configure tab notifier for site context menu option displays a site specific configuration menu. This overrides the global extension settings so that it either offers to run a whitelist or blacklist of sites.

Advanced users can use regular expressions to fine tune title matches for specific sites. This can be useful if a site uses different page titles instead of just one (or to be only notified if the notification count reaches ten or more messages).

Notifications are displayed in the lower right corner of the screen, and not in the browser window. Firefox users can download Tab Notifier from the Mozilla Add-ons repository, Chrome users from the developer’s website. Apple Macintosh users need to have Growl installed to use the extension.

Android users can download Chrome Beta from Android Market, where it is available for download. A version of the browser has also been downloaded and made available again by members of the XDA-Developer forum.

Chrome for Android Beta ships with some Chrome desktop features, including the browser’s omnibox to search and navigate directly from the browser’s address bar, a tab driven interface, and the private browsing mode (incognito mode). Other features of the desktop version, like themes and extensions support are currently not available in the beta client.

Chrome for Android furthermore synchronizes bookmarks and open tabs with desktop versions.For synchronization to work, you need to sign in to Chrome on all devices that you want to synchronize.

The mobile version of Chrome introduces several device specific features. This includes options to flip through all open tabs with a swipe, or the new link zooming feature that makes the selection of links more comfortable in the mobile browser.

Google has released a video that introduces the Chrome for Android beta version. The video demonstrates the tab swiping capabilities of the browser among other things.

Most user comments on Android Market, Google Plus and other announcement locations are quite positive. The average rating currently on Android market is 4.3. Critics have pointed out that Chrome for Android does not support Flash, and that it is not possible to switch to the desktop version of a site if available. Positive aspects are speed mainly and the synchronization of tabs and bookmarks.

Google plans to release the mobile browser in other countries in the near future. It is not clear at this point in time if pre-Android 4.0 devices will also be able to download and install the browser. (via Caschy)

Have you played around with Chrome for Android yet? Let me know what you think of this initial release in the comments.

Page Snooze for the Google Chrome web browser adds another option to the Internet browser. The extension hides inactive tabs for a certain amount of time on a special page, before it pushes them again to the tabbar of the browser.

Chrome users have two options to work with the extension after installation. They can first and foremost right-click on any page to select the new Page Snooze option in the context menu, or click on the extension’s address bar icon instead.

The context menu displays different inactivity periods, from 5 seconds to up to two weeks. The tab is automatically removed from the tabbar once a selection has been made.

The address bar icon on the other hand will always hide a tab for one week. The tab is automatically added to the tabbar again after the selected time period.

The icon furthermore indicates the number of tabs that are currently hidden in the browser. A right-click and the selection of options displays the list of tabs that are currently hidden in the browser.

Each entry displays the website’s favicon, page title and the date and time it will be moved to the tabbar again.

Google Chrome users who would like to try Page Snooze can install it from the official Chrome Web Store. It could prove useful to Chrome users who know that they do not need to access specific tabs for a specific amount of time.

I usually use desktop media players like AIMP3 to listen to Internet Radio stations, as it is a lot more comfortable than having to keep a streaming page open all the time in the web browser. That’s especially true if you have to restart the browser every now and then.

Radio Player Live is an excellent Chrome extension that offers a great radio listening experience for Chrome users. First time users need to add at least one station to the extension before they start accessing the selected stations via the extension’s Chrome address bar button.

This is done on the extension’s page. A click on Add radio stations lists all the available options. Users can add a station from the gallery listing maintained by the extension developers, add stations from popular sites such as the Shoutcast directory or Digitally Imported, or add stations manually.

All stations from the gallery can be added with a single click of the mouse button. They list many terrestrial stations, like RTL and RTL2, Virgin Radio, BBC 1 to BBC 6 or .977.

Third party stations lead to websites from where the stations need to be added. The extension adds buttons next to each station on those sites which can be used to add the selected radio station to the extension.

A click on the Radio Player Live button loads an overlay prompt to add the selected station to the radio player. The station’s name, website, logo and category can be customized here.

The station can then be selected via the extension’s button in the Chrome interface. Stations can be sorted into categories for easier identification. You can do that when you add a station, or later on under Manage my stations in the program options.

Users who do not like the theme can modify it extensively in the options. From background and header text colors to borders, category names and srollbars. Nearly every visual aspect can be modified.

The player window itself displays a list of radio stations, the currently playing station, the volume, and pause and stop options. You can switch to another radio station with a click.

The program supports VLC and Windows Media Player plugins, but I was not able to get those to work in the Chrome browser. It is not clear from the description whether they are used to play the radio stations in the browser, or if the music is redirected to the desktop player from where they are then played.

Google Chrome users who like to listen to Internet radio while surfing should take a closer look at Radio Player Live.

Tracking is directly related to a user’s privacy online. Tracking happens in a number of ways, but they all have in common that they track the user globally and not only on a single domain or website.

This is done with a number of technological tricks, cookies for instance, unique identifiers or even a user’s IP address if it is not dynamic.

User profiles are generated that are either sold to other companies, or used to display targeted ads to that user.

Do Not Track Plus is an extension for the Chrome browser that informs users about tracking on websites and at the same time blocks those scrips from being executed.

When you visit a website you will see the extension’s address bar icon indicate the number of tracking related scripts that run on the site. All tracking related scripts are sorted into the three categories social buttons, ad networks and companies.

You can click on an entry to see a detailed listing of the scripts that run on the site.

Social buttons are blocked from sending out information. They remain active though which means that you can still like, tweet or +1 posts when you click on them. If you do, the functionality is activated again by Do Not Track Plus.

Ad networks display the scripts that track your activities on the current site. The extension links to opt-out information to prevent those sites from tracking you automatically (for as long as the cookie stays on your system, that is).

The third and final group is a list of all scripts that are tracking you on the site. You can unblock specific companies here. Keep in mind that this is a site-specific setting. If you disable the blocking of Adsense here on Ghacks, you will still have it blocked on all other sites by default.

Why would you want to unblock ads on some sites? To support the webmaster and site operators of course.

The extension furthermore computes an overall score of tracking related scripts that it blocked for you. You can turn off the extension on particular sites with a click on the On button in the top left corner of the screen. One of the issues that you will experience if you turn it off completely or on a per-script basis is that you need to reload the page manually before the changes become visible.

A click on Settings displays all companies that the extension recognizes on the web. Here you can unblock a specific company globally.

Watch the video below for more information:

The core issue that I personally have with the program is that it is not available in the Chrome web store, but only on the developer’s website.

Chrome users can download Do Not Track Plus from that website.

Update: The add-on is also available in a version for the Firefox and Opera web browser.

Pretty Facebook Chat is a Google Chrome extension that lets you customize your Facebook Chat experience further. You will notice the red dot that the extension adds next to Facebook’s Chat menu on the lower right corner of the page. This is used to turn the extension on or off. Once you start a chat with someone on Facebook, you will notice the modified user interface right away.

The first thing that becomes obvious right away is that the chat window is no longer attached to the page. You can drag and drop the chat around on the page to move it to a position that you find more comfortable. You can however only move it around in the Chrome window, and not to a location outside of it.

You may also notice that the chat window is larger than the standard window on Facebook, and that its author has added interface customizations to it, like shadows or little animations.

Another thing that you will notice is the emoticons button that has been added to the window. You can click on it to display a large list of emoticons and images that you can add to the chat with a click. This even includes a list of miniature profile pictures that can be added to individual messages.

Here is a video that demonstrates the capabilities of the extension.

Facebook users who use the Chrome browser to connect to the site may want to take a look at the extension to spice up their chat experience on the site. The extension is available for direct installation at the official Chrome Web Store.

While it is understandable that Google wants to earn money from the service, it is also understandable that some users may be fed up with the video ads that they are forced to watch. This is especially true if the same video ad is showing up on multiple videos that you watch on YouTube.

Some videos can be skipped after five seconds of play, while others cannot be skipped at all.

Most users do not mind the occasional ad as they very well know that it costs a lot to operate a site like YouTube. If you have to endure video ads on YouTube constantly though, you may be inclined to look for a way to bypass those ads to improve your experience on the site.

The Google Chrome extension Skip Ads On YouTube does exactly that. It is a manual solution though and not automatic. The extension adds a blue play button to the YouTube video page. A click on the button skips any video ad that is playing at that moment and goes right to the hosted video.

The downside to this operation is that you have to click on the button every time you want to skip a video ad on the site. It also needs to be noted that it only works on YouTube directly, and not on third party sites.

The developer has made available a paid version of the extension that can skip ads on YouTube automatically. It is available for $4.

Google Chrome users can download and install Skip ads on YouTube from the official Chrome web store.

Several alternatives are available:

• YouTube Options for Google Chrome – Options to hide in-video-ads and annotations.
• Skip Youtube Video Ads With F5
• Block YouTube video ads with TubeStop for Firefox

Know of another option to block video ads or those small overlay text ads on YouTube? Let everyone know about it in the comments.

• Find an appropriate host for the file. This can be self hosted web space or a file hosting service.
• Open the file browser, locate the file on your computer and select to upload it
• Grab the link to the file and paste it into the comment form at the exact location that you want it to appear.

This process becomes a thing of the past with Drag2Up for the Google Chrome browser. You specify an image, text and binary hosting services from the available selection. Once you have done that, you can use any web form on the Internet to upload files to those services. Even better, the extension pastes the link to the uploaded files directly in that web form.

This is for instance ideal for users who like to post images on Twitter or other sites. Open the extension settings with a click on the Wrench Icon > Tools > Extensions, and the selection of Options next to the Drag2Up listing in the extensions manager.

Just drag and drop the file hosts that you want to use to the appropriate sections on the right. Here is the current list of supported hosts:

• Images: Imgur, Imm.io, ImageShack, Snelhest, Flickr, Picasa, TwitrPix, Twitpic, Twitgoo, Img.ly, Posterous
• Text: Gist.Github, Pastebin.com, Mysticpaste
• Binary: Checmial Servers, DAFK Up, Minus, Hotfile, Dropbox, CloudApp, Box and Droplr

The selected hosts are then used as the default storage services when files are uploaded via the drag and drop operations. All you need to do from that moment on is to drag and drop files that you want to upload to forms on the selected web page. Let me give you an example on how this works on Twitter.

Visit the Twitter web page, and drag a file from your computer to the What’s Happening form there. You will notice that drop files here is displayed on every form on the page automatically.

The file is submitted to the selected file host, and the resulting link to the file posted directly in the Twitter form. This saves you quite a few steps.

You may want to disable the “enable marketing” option in the extension settings to avoid advertisement.

Google Chrome users can download the latest version of Drag2Up from the official Chrome Web Store.

Lets take a closer look at how this works. The extension, available for the Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome web browser picks up mp3 files automatically that you happen to stumble upon on the Internet. This is automatic, and a player is displayed at the bottom of the browser window to play those songs directly on the page. Registered users get the additional benefit that discovered music is saved so that they can open it at anytime on the Ex.FM website.

The service works well with popular music sites such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, the Live Music Archive or music blogs hosted on Tumblr. Songs are picked up automatically even if you do not play the songs on the site. They are then sorted automatically by site > artist and album on the Exfm website.

You can click on the extension icon to bring up the current music queue that offers all the options you would expect from a music player (back, forward, pause, stop volume).

If you do not want to look for music by yourself, you can use the trending and explore options on the site to get your daily music fix.

Trending displays the top 20 tracks of the last 24 hours on Ex.FM.

The explore section on the site offers several options:

• Site of the day – A new site every day that posts publicly accessible mp3 music.
• Genres – Pick a genre and get a selection of music that other users have found.
• Featured Album – A favorite editor picked album of the day.
• Tastemakers – Music discovered by popular Ex.FM members is posted here.
• Monthly Mixtape – A hand picked mixtape that changes monthly.
• Latest loved – Realtime music discovery, again from other users of the site.

The extensions are not needed to use the service. You can visit the service to access both the trending and explore sections of the site.

If you like to discover new music, or are simply looking for a versatile web music player that picks up songs that you find on web pages automatically, then you should take a closer look at Exfm. And since it is all about direct mp3 links, you won’t encounter country restrictions like you would with other services or players. Thumbs up!

Context is a useful extension that allows you to group extensions and enable or disable those groups at will. All you need to do to get started after installation is to open the options of the extensions and start adding new contexts (aka groups). You are asked to select a name and icon for the context for identification purposes. The extension displays 14 different icons that you can select for your groups.

Once created, you can start dragging and dropping extension into those groups. Context by default will only display extensions in the options that you can move into groups. You can enable apps support under additional options to group applications as well.

Click the Save button once you are done. You can from that moment on click on the Context menu button to select one of the extension groups that you want to work with. Switching between groups, or enabling all extensions, works without a restart of the browser. Keep in mind though that extensions that you have not added to any groups are not available when you activate individual groups. They become only available if you enable the all extensions option. Only the extensions and apps that you have added to that particular group are then enabled in the browser, with everything else disabled.

Context will display a notification at the bottom whenever you install a new app or extension. You can use it to move the program into one of the available groups.

The core benefits should be obvious. You first save browser resources by reducing the number of extensions that are running in the background. You second save screen estate and increase the visibility by removing extension icons from the address bar that you do not need to work with right now.

Google Chrome users can download the useful extension from the official Chrome Web Store.

The latest option has been exclusively designed for the Google Chrome web browser and therefor also Google’s Chromebook. The web application allows you to download nearly all textual contents from Wikipedia to make them available directly in the Chrome browser.

You are asked to either pick a 13 Megabyte dump of the most popular Wikipedia articles or the big database which weights in at about 1 Gigabyte. You can also select one of four available parsers which turn the Wikipedia information into HTML contents that are readable in the web browser.

Especially the large download make take a while, and you also need to make sure that you have enough disk space available for it.

Once installed you can use the following page to access your Wikipedia information offline in the Chrome browser. The developer suggests to bookmark the page for fast access.

It offers a search option, access to the program settings, access to the article index and an option to load a random article from the repository.

The search supports suggestions which are displayed automatically once you start typing in the first letter of your search term.

The articles are complete with the exception of media and the footnotes which are not displayed at all.

Search results are displayed almost instantly on modern computer systems.

Chrome users who would like their own personal Wikipedia copy on their computer can download and install the web app from the official Chrome web store. (via Chromestory)

Technology today can be used to track users across domains. A study in 2009 saw Google on 92 of the top 100 sites followed by DoubleClick with 70 presences (which are now also Google owned) and Microsoft’s Atlas with 60 occurrences.

Cookies, regular or Flash, are usually used to track users. These cookies can be accessed on all domains a company script is loaded on, which in the case of Google would mean the ability to track user movement on 92 of the top 100 domains in the world. While this percentage is surely going down a bit if the sample size increases, it is still common to be tracked across many web properties.

There are options available to not be tracked online. This includes clearing all cookies after or even during a browsing session, using private browsing modes, or installing extensions like the excellent NoScript to block third party scripts from running on a site.

TrackerBlock, available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome offers another option. The program can make sure that you are not tracked across the web. It does so in a number of ways:

• Do Not Track Me Header – Whenever you make a request to a website, you submit a signal that tells the website that you do not want your activities tracked. Websites and companies are not obligated though. Option to delete Flash cookies.
• Opt-Out Cookies – So called opt-out cookies tell websites, services and agencies that the user does not want to be tracked. This turns off data collection and tracking off more than one hundred companies.
• Tracker Blocking – Blocks advertising agencies and companies from reading or writing cookies on your system. The extension does that for more than 550 different companies.
• HTML5 Storage – Visualizes which companies are using HTML5 to store data on your system, with options to delete the data manually.

Click on an image to see how the settings and preferences look like in the Firefox web browser.

The program combines several anti-tracking options in one interface. Especially useful is the ability to write the opt-out cookies on the system, to clear Flash and HTML5 data storage that are often used for tracking, and to block advertising companies from reading or writing cookies on the system.

TrackerBlock can best be installed at the Privacy Choice website, as it is available there for all supported browsers. It is not really clear if the extension is available for other browsers as well. It is definitely available for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

The Google Chrome Oogle extension improves this essential part of the image search experience in multiple ways. When you click on an image in the search results you are still taken to the page the image was found on. Instead of having to scroll down until you locate it by yourself, this is now handled by the extension automatically.

It will automatically scroll to the location of the image on the page so that you can see it right away. To top it all off, it furthermore highlights the image with a border so that you can recognize it even if other images are displayed next to it on the page.

Identification works very well most of the time. The developer has stated however that there are pages where it does not work yet.

Chrome users can change the highlighting color from black to another color in the extension’s options.

Just enter another color into the “highlight image in page with a shadow in” form. You should see the new color immediately being applied to the border of the form.

The options furthermore allows you to switch between the new and old style of image results, and to enable Google’s lightbox which overlays the image you have been searching for on the page it has been posted on.

Oogle is a basic extension that can speed up the a user’s workflow considerably when searching for images on Google’s image search engine.

The ability to highlight and scroll to the image sets it apart from other solutions. Chrome users can download and install Oogle from the official Chrome Web Store.

Some of my friends do not mind at all, and noise usually does not distract them a bit. Others play loud music to avoid distracting noise.

I on the other hand prefer to use background noise for that as it is less distracting than the newest Lady Gaga song. So called white, pink or brown noise reduces or eliminates the impact of other environmental noise in the vicinity.

I have reviewed a White Noise application for the Google Chrome web browser before. HisNoise takes the concept a step further by integrating five different types of background noises into the browser.

Next to pink, brown and white noise, it also makes available thunderstorm and beach waves soundscapes. The extension adds an icon to Chrome’s address bar upon installation. A click on the icon opens the selection menu.

A click on one of the five button plays the selected background sound in an endless loop on the system. This only stops when you click on the stop button in the interface or close the Google Chrome web browser.

The slider in the extension interface changes the volume of the sound. It is suggested to turn it down first before starting to play one of the songs, as it may be to loud otherwise.

The extension icon changes its color to blue when one of the sounds is playing in the browser.

Google Chrome users can download and install hisNoise from the official Chrome Web Store.

This all in all turned out to waste more than 2 Gigabytes of space on my previous SSD which I could not use for other tasks instead.

Having to open the directory manually regularly is without doubt not the best way of handling the issue. Since Chrome is updating fairly regularly, you might have to check every month or so to delete unneeded versions of the browser from your hard drive.

Old Chrome Remover is a free program for the Windows operating system that can remove old versions of the Google Browser automatically from the system. It will automatically check for Chrome installations on the system when run and display all old version in a window afterwards.

The application supports not only Chrome Stable installations but also other Chrome installations including cutting edge Canary builds. Please note that it will display and offer to delete all old versions from the hard drive, with no option to manually select the versions you want deleted.

You need to press the Y key on the keyword to have the program delete all outdated Chrome installations on the system. If you do not want that you can press any other key to leave everything as is. You need to close all instances of the Chrome browser prior to deleting the old Chrome folders on the system. You will receive an access denied error message otherwise. The program needs to be run with elevated privileges under Vista and Windows 7.

Note that you should not run the tool if you have multiple Chrome channels installed on your system, as it will delete ALL old instances which means that you will end up with only one working version of Chrome (this happened on my system where I was running Dev and Canary builds of the browser. After running the tool, only the Canary build was still available, while the Dev build was not).

Old Chrome Remover is therefor only an option if you are running one version of Chrome on your system. Advanced users can use the /AUTO parameter to run the program silently.

Interested users can download Old Chrome Remover from Shane Gowlands website. Please note that the program requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 to work. (via JKWebTalks)

KB SSL Enforcer is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to enforce SSL encryption on websites and services that support it. If it detects that a site is offering both http and https connections, it will automatically connect the user to the more secure https connection to improve online security.

The extension handles the detection and switching to SSL automatically. The concept is very similar to HTTPS Everywhere for the Firefox web browser, with the difference that HTTPS Everywhere only enforces SSL on sites in its database (with options to create your own rule sets).

The extension maintains a list of sites supporting SSL that you have accessed in the cache to speed up future connections.

You may however come upon sites sometimes that do not work properly when connecting to them via https. A blacklist is provided that will block the automatic redirection to https for listed sites. Open the settings of SSL Enforcer by loading the following url in the web browser (chrome://settings/extensions) and clicking on the Options link next to the extension.

The extension handles domains with and without www differently. You can change that in the options so that rules defined for a site apply to both versions.

You can also add sites to a whitelist, which you may need to do if the automatic detection does not discover if a domain supports SSL connections.

Google Chrome users can download SSL Enforcer from the official Chrome web store.

Every now and then I encounter words or phrases in articles on the Internet that I would have a hard time pronouncing, and while I often pick the most likely variant, I sometimes would like to find out if what I picked is the correct pronunciation of the word or phrase.

Enter How Do You Say for the Google Chrome browser. The free extension offers to pronounce word, phrases and even sentences that you either enter manually or highlight on the active web page.

The extension is set to passive mode upon installation, which means that you need to enter words in the extension interface. This is done with a click on the icon in the address bar, entering the word or phrase that you’d like pronounced and a click on the play button.

Please note that you can only get the software to pronounce words that it has saved in its database, it will remain silent if you enter a word that is not saved there. This is for instance the case with many names or places.

More comfortable than the manual option is the automatic word pronunciation option. You need to enable it first for the page you are own. The extension will from that moment on pronounce every word that you are highlighting on the page.

You can alternatively use the shortcut Alt-X to enable or disable the automatic option.

The pronunciations are solid and spoken with a somewhat mechanical voice. Probably the biggest issue of the program is that automatic pronunciation needs to be enabled on a per-page basis. It is for instance not possible to enable the automatic feature for all pages of a domain.

Google Chrome users who would like a pronunciation aid can download the extension from the official Chrome Web Store.