Videoholics are dime a dozen these days. Who doesn’t watch Youtube like they used to watch TV?
The only thing is, there are hundreds of distractions on the webpage serving the videos.

Imagine if you were watching a movie and there were boxes on the sides that showed you related movies and information about the actors.
Sure, it would be interesting, but it is distracting!

Turn Off The Lights solves the problem.

Chrome Extension to Dim Everything But the Video

Turn Off The Lights is an extension for Chrome that dims all of the webpage but the video you’re watching, so that you aren’t distracted by the disturbing and irritating elements of the webpage.

Also, with this extension, you can select the background color, and the opacity of the background. So if you want, you can adjust the default setting of black and an 80% opacity with a bright red and a 100% opacity if you so desire (though that would probably be more distracting than ever)

To enable the dimming, simply click the bulb icon that appears next to the video title after installing the extension.

Site Compatibility?

This extension will work with any site that has embedded video. I’m yet to find one that doesn’t work with it.

Download Turn Off the Lights

You can download Turn Off the Lights from here.

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Fastest Chrome is a really cool extension for Google Chrome that really lets you make the most of the browser.
In fact, the name of the extension says it all – “Fastest Chrome“. Not Faster, but Fastest.

What can Fastest Chrome do?

Fastest Chrome doesn’t tweak your browser to make it use less memory or anything like that – it makes YOU faster, by giving you related searches, endless scrolling, and many more.

You know how irritating multi-page articles are? Don’t you wish you could just read the whole lot on one page rather than hunt for that tiny “next” link and wait for the next page to load before you can continue reading?
Well, that’s one of the things Fastest Chrome solves – you can use it’s endless scrolling option, which automatically loads the next page of a multi page article that you’re reading, saving you the trouble.

Fastest Chrome also includes relevant search results from other search engines in your Google search results – helping you find what you want to much faster. And if that’s not all, you can simply highlight a word, and up pops a menu that you can use to search for the highlighted word or phrase in a dictionary, Wikipedia, or any other search engine.

Here’s a succinct list of features that Fastest Chrome provides:

• Look up definitions by highlighting a word
• Better Google: shows you relevant results from other search engines automatically
• Endless Pages automatically loads the next page when you reach the end
• Search more conveniently: select text then click on a search engine to search
• Automatically turns text URLs into links
• Adds related articles to Wikipedia

So what are you waiting for? Speed up your Chrome experience and add the Fastest Chrome extension from here.

GMail’s “unobtrusive text ads” may not be as bad as other email providers’, but they can sure be irritating. And then there’s always the concern that GMail is actually scanning the content of your email to deliver these “context sensitive ads”.

If you don’t like the ads, there are any number of Firefox addons that can get the job done for you. But what if you want to replace the ads with some useful information?

Rapportive Replaces GMail ads with Sender’s Contact Info

Rapportive is a Firefox addon and a Chrome Extension that swaps those pesky ads by the side of your emails with the sender’s contact information.

How does it do that?

Rapportive simply searches various social networking sites for the name of the sender of the email. It collects all this information and displays it next to your email.

Of course, you’re concerned about having a third party addon in your inbox. But Rapportive doesn’t have access to your GMail credentials at all, so there’s no worry on that front.

You can check out and install the addon from the Rapportive website.

If you’re a power user, you probably have a number of web browsers, and you use each one for a particular purpose. Flock for social networking, Firefox for entertainment, Chrome for your office, or whatever.

Choose Wisely eliminates the single default browser option, and allows you to set different defaults for different links, or present a menu to choose your browser each time you click a link.

How to setup Choose Wisely

Setting it up is trivial. First, download the app from here and install it.

Now, as your default browser, you set Choose Wisely, instead of selecting a browser (in System Preferences)

Now, each time you open a link, Choose Wisely opens and asks you what browser you want to open it with (you can specify upto five browsers). Once you open a link with a particular browser, Choose Wisely remembers and opens it with the same next time instead of showing you the menu again.

[via Lifehacker]

Hexxeh has released the latest ChromiumOS build that’s he’s come up with – codenamed Flow.
The notable changes this version are the Nvidia support, customisable app menus and auto updater.

New Features in Flow

Flow boasts quite a number of cool features:

• User-customisable menus (rearrange, add, delete apps on your own menu)
• Automatic updates via the Velocity engine (with an all new interface from what you saw in the BETA, it’s now been integrated into the browser)
• nVidia GPU support (this includes ION, and it’s fully hardware accelerated)
• Realtek RTL8187SE support (RTL8192E is coming as an update soon)
• Audio fix
• Flash fix
• Bookmark Sync fix
• Power indicator fix (as long as it worked in Cherry)
• Battery life improvements
• Increased image size to 2GB (1GB was becoming too restrictive, needed to do this to add more hardware support, sorry!)
• Webcam support (to test this, right click on a YouTube video and then click settings)

Download and Installation

Hexxeh’s ChromiumOS runs right off a USB flash drive. To install Flow, you will require a 2GB flash drive (minimum), but the download size is only 327MB.
You can download the USB image right from here.

Find out how to write usb images to your USB drive here.

After using Firefox with hundreds of tab-organisation addons, Chrome, fast though it is, gets out of control very fast.
On Chrome, with it’s lack of any good tab extensions, it becomes very difficult to manage your tabs.

TabJump Lets you Easily Manage Chrome’s Tabs

TabJump is a neat extension for Google Chrome that lets you easily manage tabs.

The extension’s page on the Chrome extension gallery lists these features:

• Jump to frequently used tabs
• Jump to related tabs (tabs from the same site, etc
• Restore recently closed tabs
• Lock a tab to prevent accidental closing (only work for tabs loaded after TabJump is installed)

Grab the extension for Google Chrome from here.

Tell us how it improved your Chrome experience in the comments!

If your computer is in an easily accessible place and your friends and family find it amusing to close all the tabs you had open, this is an extension you’ll definitely want.

Chrome Lock Your Browser

Chrome Lock is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to lock your browser.

Once locked, you require a password to unlock it again.

Using Chrome Lock

Simply head to this page and install the Chrome Lock extension.

Once installed, locking is achieved by pressing the Ctrl+Shift+L key combination.

To change the password of Chrome lock, simply head to the extensions page (chrome://extentions) and click the settings icon next to Chrome Lock.

By default, the password is blank.

Once activated, your browser will remain locked even if restarted.

However, you can open a new tab, quit, or even use the chrome:// and file:// pages, which are not locked.