Make Tech Easier » google chrome

How to Enable Flash Support in Google Chrome in Ubuntu

Damien — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:29:54 +0000

The Chromium team has released an alpha unstable version of the Google Chrome for Linux and Mac platform. Those who are keen to try out Google Chrome in their Ubuntu machine, but are not willing to run it under wine, you can now grab the deb file and install it in your system.

One of the limitation of Google Chrome in Linux is that it does not support flash. If you intend to use it to watch your favorite YouTube channel, then you are out of luck. Luckily, there is a little trick that you can use to overcome this limitation. If you have installed the Adobe Flash player for your Firefox browser, you can now use the same player to run flash script in Google Chrome.

Installation

If you have not installed Google Chrome (unstable), go to the Chromium dev channel and grab the respective deb file for your system (32-bit and 64-bit). Double click on the deb file to start the installation. The whole process shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Check for Adobe Flash player

If you have previously installed the Adobe Flash Player in your system, you should be able to find the libflashplayer.so file in the /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer directory. However, if you have installed the Flash player via the ubuntu-restricted-extra package, the libflashplayer.so will be located at the /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin directory instead.

To find out where your libflashplayer.so is located, you might want to do a search in Nautilus.

If you have not installed Flash Player, run the command in your terminal to install it:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Installing the Flash plugin

Create a plugins folder in the Google Chrome directory

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Copy the libflashplayer.so file to the plugins folder.

sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Note: change the source path if your libflashplayer.so file is not located at other location.

Editing the Application menu

Right click at the Application menubar and select “Edit Menus”

Scroll down to find “Internet” on the left pane and select Google Chrome on the right. Click on the Properties button on the right side.

In the Command field, change the command to

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --enable-plugins %U

Save and close all the windows.

The flash player should be working in your Google Chrome now.

How to Enable Flash Support in Google Chrome in Ubuntu originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers

Joshua Price — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:33:30 +0000

Like many of you, I use a LOT of different computers. Some at home, some at work, some in between. Many of these computers have more than one operating system installed, and those operating systems may have more than one browser. All this leaves a LOT of places you may have saved your bookmarks. What’s saved on one might not be saved on another, or perhaps you reformatted your OS and forgot to backup your favorite websites. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to solve this problem, and today we’ll be covering some of them. Each of the programs/toolbars/extensions we’ll try out today can store your bookmarks outside your browser so that they can be accessed from anywhere.

1. Foxmarks/Xmarks

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, IE, Safari)

Saves: Bookmarks, Passwords

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a browser extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks from several locations so that they can follow you anywhere. It used to be a Firefox-only extension, but now has extend its reach to Internet Explorer and Safari. The website has a type of content search where you can see reviews and ratings for many web sites based on the users of the Xmarks extension. With the Xmarks extension installed, you’ll also notice some new icons next to your Google search results indicating ratings and reviews for some of the sites in your search results.

Xmarks also includes an option to sync your saved passwords, so that you can keep the passwords saved in one browser and share them to all the others where you installed Xmarks.

To install the Xmarks extension, go to http://download.xmarks.com/download and choose the appropriate plugin for your browser.

2. delicious

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Chrome)

Saves: Bookmarks

Any topic on web bookmark services will always eventually lead to http://delicious.com/ (previously known as del.icio.us). This site has been around for a while and has always been a great place to store and share your bookmarks. Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords, so that you can search your (or other people’s) bookmarks based on tags. From the website you can search with those tags to see what bookmarks others have submitted on that topic.

The browser extension for Firefox can be found here.

The browser extension for IE8 can be found here

The browser extension for Safari can be found here

For Google Chrome, go to the delicious site and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.

3. Mozilla Weave

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox)

Saves: Bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs

Finally, there’s Mozilla Weave. This is a much more ambitious project than just saving your bookmarks online. Weave is intended to let you keep a complete browser “experience” from one computer to the next. It saves much more info online so that you can access things like your browsing history and tabs along with bookmarks and passwords when roaming to a different Firefox installation. Keeping things like your browser history saved online would make it a lot easier to access that page-you-were-on-yesterday-but-can’t-quite-remember-the-name, or pull up that news article you just saw but isn’t on the site’s front page anymore.

Weave appears to be a very useful tool, but unfortunately it seems to require Firefox 3.5, which is still in development. If you’re really excited to try out Weave but don’t want to wait until 3.5 is officially released as stable, you can get information on download and installation at the Mozilla Labs website.

There are some other options out there that I chose not to include in this article for various reasons such as platform portability or concerns about data privacy. If you’re using a bookmark sync program/extension to manage your bookmarks, I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

10 Useful Google Chrome Tips and Tricks

Damien — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:23:04 +0000

Now that you have enjoyed the speed of Google Chrome, it’s time to dig deeper and get more out of it. Here are 10 tips/tricks to supercharge your chroming experience.

1) Install flash player in Google Chrome

After you have installed Chrome, some of you will find that you are not able to view Youtube video. This is especially true if you are installing Chrome under Ubuntu (or other Linux distro).

Here is what you can do to fix the problem:

Download the flash player for windows xpi file.
Change the xpi extension to zip
Extract the content of the zip file into a folder
Copy the files flashplayer.xpt and NPSWF32.dll to the directory /home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/USERNAME/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application/Plugins.
For Vista, copy to the directory: C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\Plugins
For XP, copy to the directory C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\Plugins
Create the Plugins folder if it does not exist.

Restart your Chrome. Your flash player should be working now.

2) Search from the URL bar

Unlike Firefox, you can’t find a search bar in Chrome. To perform a search, simply type your search phrase in the URL bar and press ‘Enter’. Chrome will automatically perform a Google search with the phrase.

If you want to go to a site rather than performing a search, press “Ctrl + Enter” instead. This will insert www and .com in front and behind of the term and Chrome will bring you to the site.

3) Change omnibox suggestion count

By default, Chrome only shows 5 URL suggestions when you type in the URL bar.

To increase/decrease the suggestion count, simply add the command line switch

--omnibox-popup-count=your_desirable_suggestions_count

where your_desirable_suggestion_count is the number of suggestions that you want it to show.

In Windows, right click on the Chrome shortcut icon and select Properties. In the Target field, add the above command line switch to the end of the command.

In Ubuntu, on the desktop, right click on the Application menu and select Edit Menus. Navigate to wine->Programs->Google Chrome on the left pane. Double click on Google Chrome on the right pane and edit the Command.

4) Creating multiple profiles

If you are sharing your computer with others (such as your family members), you may want to create a separate profile for everyone others won’t have access to your search history.

Open the User Data folder your Chrome installation directory.

For Windows Vista

C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

For Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data

For Ubuntu

/home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/USERNAME/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/User Data

Copy the Default folder and paste it in the User Data folder under another name (say Your_name).

Create a shortcut icon on your desktop and add the following command switch to your path:

--user-data-dir="..\User Data\Your_Name"

For Vista:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -–user-data-dir="..\User Data\Your_Name"

For Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –-user-data-dir="..\User Data\Your_Name"

For Ubuntu

wine /home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/USERNAME/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/Google/Chrome/chrome.exe --new-http --in-process-plugins –-user-data-dir="../User\ Data\Your_Name"

5) Change Chrome theme

If you don’t like the default theme, you can easily change it with the following steps:

Download a Chrome theme of your liking.
Extract the default.dll file.
Navigate to your Chrome installation directory and go to /Application/Chrome version/Themes folder. The Chrome version will be in the form of 0.2.129.27. Replace the default.dll file in the folder with the default.dll file that you have just extracted.
Voila! Your Chrome is now dressed with the new theme.

6) Email link with Gmail

In Chrome, you can easily create a bookmarklet to email links with your Gmail account. Here is what you do:

In your Chrome, press “Ctrl + B” to load the bookmark bar. Right-click on the bar and select ‘Add Page‘

In the Name field, type Send with Gmail (or whatever name you like).

In the URL field, copy and paste the following code:

javascript:document.location='https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&view=cm&fs=1&su='+document.title+'&body='+document.location;

and press OK.

If you want Gmail to load in a separate tab, insert this code instead:

javascript:window.open('https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&su='+document.title+'&body='+document.location);return false;

Whenever you want to send a link to other, simply click the Send with Gmail bookmarklet and the Gmail compose mail window will appear.

7) Download Youtube video

This trick allows you to download Youtube video right from your Chrome.

Same as the Send with Gmail trick, make a new bookmarklet and name it Download Youtube

In the URL field, copy and paste the following code in:

javascript:window.location.href='http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=' + swfArgs['video_id'] + "&l=" + swfArgs['l'] + "&sk=" + swfArgs['sk'] + '&fmt_map' + swfArgs['fmt_map'] + '&t=' + swfArgs['t'];

Now go to Youtube and watch any video. Click the Download Youtube bookmarklet and it will save the current video to your hard drive. Remember to add a .flv extension to the downloaded video.

(Source: unlockforus.blogspot.com)

8) Zoom in/out

For those who find that the font is too big/small for your viewing, you can zoom in/out the page by pressing Ctrl + Mousewheel.

9) Drag and drop tab to load in a new window

When you have more than one tabs, you can easily drag any tab and drop it on the menu bar to load a new window.

10) Install Greasemonkey on Chrome

Although Greasemonkey is an addon for Firefox, you can easily get it to work in Chrome with this simple tweak:

Drag this Monkey to your Chrome bookmark bar.

This Monkey bokmarklet will enable any userscripts to be automatically turned into bookmarklets.

To install Greasemonkey script on Google Chrome, go to user script and search for the Greasemonkey script you want. Visit the installation script page which says “install the script” and click on the Monkey bookmarklet, this will change the script into Chrome compatible bookmarklet. Now drag “Install the script” onto the bookmark bar of chrome. That’s it! (reference from Blogote)

What are your favorite Chrome tips and tricks? Let us know in the comments.

10 Useful Google Chrome Tips and Tricks originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)