extension

Xobni introduces Smartr contact management for Gmail and Android

Xobni, maker of popular contact management tools for Outlook and BlackBerry, has today announced a new sub-brand along with two new products ready for public beta. Smartr Inbox for Gmail and Smartr Contacts for Android--both previously branded as Xobni products during their private beta stage--now bring Xobni's contact management powers to Google's e-mail platform.

Smartr Inbox for Gmail is a browser extension that adds a useful sidebar to your Gmail interface. With it, you can easily pull up any contact you've ever communicated with, along with details of your e-mail relationship, history, and even common contacts between … Read more

How to add auto-correct to Gmail in Chrome

Wish you could harness the power of a smartphone's auto-correction technique in Gmail on the Web? Now you can. ezAutoCorrect for Gmail is a new Chrome extension that will correct some of your most common spelling errors. While the dictionary is relatively limited for now, it will fix some of your most frequest mistakes. The correction process requires no input from you--meaning no more right-click dictionary madness for your typos any longer!

Open Chrome and head to ezAutoCorrect for GMail in the Chrome Web Store. Now click on Add to Chrome, and wait for the extension to install … Read more

Scrambling to undo Facebook's changes as they roll out

The upgrades and additions to Facebook are rolling out of the f8 developers' conference today, while other developers are working furiously to come up with ways to undo them.

Better Facebook is a Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera extension that's been around for a few years now and allows a comprehensive set of at least 75 customization options to Facebook's look, feel, and features.

Since Facebook revamped its news feed this week--much to the chagrin of many users--Better Facebook has seen a big bump in traffic and new users, as developer Matt Kruse posted on the Better Facebook fan page late yesterday:

Wow, it's been kind of a crazy day. Big FB changes, Dropbox stopped serving my images (and started again), the web site got over 100,000 hits, and this page acquired 5,000 new fans!

The changes--including the addition of a real-time scrolling "ticker" of Facebook friends' activity--originally caused Better Facebook to "disappear" from the interface for many users. Kruse went to work updating the extension and adding new capability to control and mitigate the new additions. The latest version includes the option to hide the ticker.

New suggestions from users for possible "fixes" to be integrated into Better Facebook have also started to roll in to Kruse at an accelerated clip.

Kruse says donations have continued to flow in to support his work, which is a good thing, because he's likely to have a whole lot of work ahead of him. The redesign announced today will give Facebook users the ability to integrate "Open Graph apps" into their experience, adding music, TV, movies, news, and a whole lot more to the feed. That ought to keep Kruse busy for a while.… Read more

How to hide the Facebook ticker

If you have checked Facebook today, you have probably noticed a sidebar ticker has been added to the right-hand column of the newly redesigned News Feed, along with complaints and snarky comments about the new News Feed and this ticker. About the ticker, Facebook says:

Ticker, on the right-hand side of your account, lets you see all your friends' activity in real-time. When you hover over an item on ticker, you can see the full story and join the conversation as it happens. Ticker updates itself as stories happen. This gives you a more complete picture of what your friends … Read more

iPhone 5 rumors

Amazon.com gets a redesign, Toshiba releases what it calls the world's thinnest laptop, and iPhone 5 rumors heat up with employees at Best Buy and Apple stores leaking release information.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Five ways to avoid being tracked on the Web

Web spies are getting stealthier and stealthier. Recently they've been caught peering into our browser histories to determine the sites we've visited, even in so-called privacy mode with cookies disabled, as Dan Goodin described earlier this month on The Register.

Many of the companies whose sites were discovered using the technique claimed to have had no idea and immediately decried the spying. Julia Angwin reported on many of these surprise responses on the Wall Street Journal's Technology site.

If the owners of the spying sites aren't even aware of the activity, what are unsuspecting visitors to … Read more

New Aurora 8 works on memory, guts, and add-ons

Mozilla upgraded its developer's edition of Firefox today to version 8, including changing how forced third-party add-ons are handled and debuting a series of under-the-hood tweaks that continue a renewed assault on performance gains made in Firefox 7 Beta. Firefox 8 Aurora can be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it marks the first release of Aurora for Android.

Two add-on changes were revealed last week that represent, for the first time in possibly years, that Mozilla has forced changes on how third-party programs and Firefox interact. Basically, Mozilla is disabling the ability of a third-party program, like … Read more

Browser-based loan calculator

Web Loanalyzer is a free loan calculator written in HTML and JavaScript. It quickly analyzes a loan's parameters and explains in plain English how long it will take to pay the loan off, how much interest will be paid, and so on. We took a look at Web Loanalyzer Q1.

We extracted Web Loanalyzer's zipped program file and clicked it, which opened the calculator in our Web browser. Web Loanalyzer is locally hosted, so you don't need an active Internet connection to use it. The program's interface is small, about the size of two banner ads … Read more

Kernel_task taking up RAM in OS X

If you launch the Activity Monitor utility on your Mac, you will be able to see what processes are running and what system resources they are using. As expected, some processes will take up more RAM and CPU time than others. Seeing this in Activity Monitor can be handy for figuring out which tasks are taking up an unexpected amount of CPU or RAM. One regular culprit for using a lot of RAM is Safari, but in addition you will see another process called "kernel_task" that also will regularly use a few hundred megabytes of real RAM and … Read more

Firefox 8 to tell aggressive add-ons to back off

Mozilla is taking steps to protect users from programs that install add-ons in Firefox without user permission, citing numerous reasons including security concerns and the desire to make sure that the person using Firefox has ultimate control of the add-ons installed.

Two new features will be making their debut in Firefox 8, currently on the Firefox nightly channel but planned to move to the Aurora developer's build early next week. The first feature automatically disables add-ons added to Firefox by other programs. When you start Firefox after the add-on has been installed, a notification window prompts users to either … Read more