Earlier today, Yahoo released their new browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox and browser for iPhone and iPad after news leaked about it. However, it looks like that they did it in a hurry and made a huge blunder while releasing their Google chrome extension.

As spotted by @nikcub,  Yahoo has included their private key with the Chrome extension. This private certificate will allow other users to sign their applications as Yahoo. I was able to confirm that the file was available inside the extension.

Nik further demonstrates the vulnerability of the leaked mistakenly included private certificate key in a detailed blog post which you can read here. While the extension would not be a problem currently , it would allow other scammers or phishers to pass off rogue extensions as those created by Yahoo or just re-upload the original extension with something rogue.

As a user, you should remove the current extension till Yahoo fixes this problem. To get rid of this problem, Yahoo would need to create a new certificate and sign their extension again and Google would probably have to negate the old certificate while installing extensions.

This is not the first time that such a blunder has happened when news has leaked hours before a release, but this is definitely a very big problem on Yahoo’s part.

I don’t hate Flash like Steve Jobs, but it does slow the browsing experience at times and can get annoying. There are several extensions and tools which allow you to block Flash in browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox, but most of the times Flash blocking extensions are heavy on memory usage and can slow down the browser. This is why I  prefer to use a lightweight and versatile extension called FlashBlock for Google Chrome, which does the job very well without using lot of memory.

One of the problems I have faced with this extension though is the lack of support for whitelisting/blacklisting websites. However, FlashBlock does provide users with an option to do so through a right click option as seen above. The problem is that though it is easy to unblock websites from FlashBlock, there is no easy way to block them again if you want to change your decision.

However, I did find a way to block unblocked sites in FlashBlock extension by using a simple trick. If you are someone who wants to do it, follow the steps given below.

To block a unblocked website in FlashBlock, open the website in question in Google Chrome and then click on the wrench icon and then select “Developer tools” from under the Tools menu. Alternatively, you can also use the shortcut key “Ctrl + Shift + I”

Doing the above steps will load the Chrome Developer interface. Now click on the “Resources” tab in the interface and expand the “Local Storage” dropdown. Now look for the exact URL of the website under the Local Storage menu and click on it. This will display the “Key-Value” pair of information stored for the website.

To block the website through FlashBlock again, look for the key “ujs_flashblock” and right click on it and select the “Delete” option from the menu. Once you have deleted the key, reload the website again and Flash will be blocked on it.

Though there are several other Flash blocking extensions which provide with an easier interface to manage whitelists and blacklists, the extension in question is one of the best out there and does not hog resources. Blocking a website again is a little hard, but it is a great tradeoff for performance it provides.

Google introduced the much awaited Google Drive yesterday giving users 5GB of free cloud storage. However, with that introduction it looks like Gmail has removed the option to save Gmail attachments in Google Docs and only provides options to view the document and download it. This is definitely a pain since I could easily save documents to Google Docs without problems in the past.

If you are like me and want that feature back, you can do that with a Google Chrome extension. The "Gmail Attachments to Drive" extension allows you to quickly save Gmail attachments straight to Google Drive by clicking a link. This saves you a lot of trouble because you no longer have to open the file before saving it to Google Docs. Secondly, this extension allows you to store any type of files in Google Drive.

Also Read: Google Docs vs Dropbox vs SkyDrive

Once you install the extension you will see an additional link to save the file to Google Drive. Clicking on the link should open a new window and save the file to your Google Drive account. Currently the files are stored in the main folder of Google Drive. You can easily move it to custom folders by visiting your Google Drive account.

If you are a Dropbox user, you can also save Gmail Attachments directly to your Dropbox account as well.

I am not a big fan of IM programs and hence do not use desktop chat clients e.g Google Talk, Pidgin, Digsby or Meebo. The built in chat feature of Gmail is perfectly suitable for brief conversations but there is a small catch. During a chat conversation, you have to either stick to the Gmail tab forever or constantly oscillate between multiple tabs, which can be highly annoying at times. I am composing a blog post and here comes my friend whom I can’t ignore, I switch to the Gmail tab, send a message, fall back to the earlier tab and in comes the ding!

This cycle goes on and I have to find the Gmail tab within a sea of open browser tabs; there seems to be no possible way to get out of this situation other than sticking to the Gmail tab through the entire conversation.

If you are anything like me and want to detach Gmail chat from the browser, try this chat for Google chrome extension. This extension frees Gmail chat from Google Chrome, allowing you to reply to messages from no matter what web page you’re on at any given moment. The extension works exactly the same as the desktop Gmail client, with added support for email, video calling and Google Plus hangouts.

Once you have installed the extension, sign in to your Gmail account and you are through. Here is how the chat UI of the extension looks like:

To start a voice call or a Google Plus hangout, all you have to do is hit the respective icons on the chat window. One of the biggest advantage is the ability to send quick emails to your Gmail contacts, right from the desktop, without having to open Gmail at all. Type the name of the contact in the search pane, hit the result, compose your email and shoot! No more inbox gazing every 30 minutes.

The extension is slightly slow and IM’s might take a little longer to go through. Another downside is that it doesn’t support multiple user profiles or multiple Gmail accounts, so if you are using a shared computer, you better use the standalone desktop chat client. [via]

Also read: Ultimate list of tips and tricks for Google Chrome

A few months back I had written about an interesting web app which allowed users to schedule emails in Gmail. The add-on for browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox worked very well and did its job. However, there is another entrant called "Right Inbox" which provides a similar service but is simpler to use.

Also Read: How To Send Anonymous Email | Temporary Disposable Email Services

While Boomerang for Gmail provides much more than just scheduling emails in Gmail, Right Inbox’s only focus lies on scheduling emails in Gmail. Once you install the Right Inbox extension refresh you Gmail page and you will be guided through grant permissions to the app to your Gmail Inbox.

Once you have granted permissions to the Right Inbox app, you will be able to schedule emails in Gmail with the click of a button. Right Inbox will add an additional button to the compose email workflow (as seen above) allowing you to send the email at a later time.

Clicking on the "Send Later" button will give you several options to schedule the email. You can either click on the options provided or choose to send the email at a specific time. Once you have scheduled your email, the email will be stored in your drafts folder and will be delivered at the time you chose. The best part is that you don’t have to be near your computer once you have scheduled your email and Right Inbox will do the work for you.

Right Inbox is currently available as a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on and can be downloaded from here.

Google AdSense is one of the biggest revenue generator for small and medium traffic websites. The AdSense team have been revamping their reporting interface which makes it easier for publisher to see their earnings and other related reports.

As a publisher I have always been comfortable using desktop reporting software to keep an eye on my AdSense earnings. However, of late most of the software have stopped working.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

This means that I have to constantly login into the AdSense web interface to check on my earnings every now and then. However, thanks to Google that will now be a thing of the past. Google has released a extension for Google Chrome which will allow AdSense publishers to view basic details of their earnings in Google Chrome.

The AdSense Publisher Toolbar extension (Download) allows you to view your current days earnings, yesterday’s earnings, current months earnings and last months earnings. In addition to that it also displays the top custom channels and lifetime earnings.

Once you have installed the extension, you will have to click on the extension icon and then authorize your Google account. If you use different account for AdSense and Gmail, you can easily sign in to another account thanks to Google’s multiple account sign in.

The AdSense Publisher extension is definitely a nice way to keep an eye on your AdSense earnings without having to constantly login to the actual AdSense website. I would highly recommend this extension if you are in a habit of checking your earnings multiple times through a day.

Of course, it is always a healthy habit to login to the actual AdSense reporting interface to check on detailed reports and performance of your channels and other data from time to time to increase your performance.

Don’t Forget to Read Other AdSense Tips and Tricks

• One Tricky AdSense Policy That Might Get You into Trouble
• View Google AdSense Earnings for Different Geo-locations/Countries
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Blogs/Websites
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Forums

The web is not as beautiful, as it was 10 years back.

It is certainly rich in information but no longer beautiful, thanks to all those widgets, advertisements, plugins and social media buttons plastered across each and every website you come across.

Organizing information is another big, big problem. Bookmarking is so 2007, it just doesn’t work anymore. Reading and accumulating information gets really troublesome, when you are running sort of time and hurrying through the finer details of a story.

Evernote’s Clearly changes all this.

Clearly (nice name) provides a simple way to read only the text version of a webpage, right inside Google Chrome. No advertisements, no banners, no buttons just the content, you and your browser. Following is an example of how clear a webpage becomes, once you hit the magical Clearlybutton:

Clearly comes with three preset themes to choose from, so if you are fond of reading articles on dark backgrounds and green text, you can always create your customized reading environment. The advantage of turning a webpage into its text only version is that you can read a lot faster, without getting distracted by nearby ads. Furthermore, it is super easy to copy excerpts, scroll, use the real meatand be done with it.

There are tons of other distraction free reading tools out there but Clearly has a unique offering. You can clip an article directly to one of your Evernote notebooks, or assign a unique tag to it. That way, the URL of the webpage is saved to your Evernote account, which can later be synched with the desktop client. The benefit here is that you can quickly bookmark important stories without getting lost among a pile of 2 dozen news items.

If you launch Clearly on a multi-page article, it will automatically turn it into a single page, so you can read the entire story at one place without having to click, click and click ….. all the way to the 10th page.

As of now, Clearly supports only Google Chrome while extensions for other browsers is a work in progress. Clearly wont let you save images or files but it is indeed a better alternative of Readability. Watch the following video to see Clearly in action:

Tabbed browsing has definitely changed the way we access webpages in browsers. However, I have faced a few problems with multiple tabs, one of them being   a scenario where I have 20 tabs open in Google Chrome and one of them suddenly starts playing loud video or music.

Finding the offending tab is often like finding a needle in a haystack and the best recourse is to just mute your system music. But what if you are playing music on another app? You would mute that too right. Another solution would be to just close all the tabs at once and get rid of the annoyance. Neither of these solutions are really graceful.

There have been several forum threads about this issue, but Google engineers have stated that it is hard for them to isolate a tab which is playing music or video and allow users to mute them, thanks to limitations in the operating system.

However, there is an option in the form of a Google Chrome Extension which will allow you to mute music or video sounds in all the tabs at once, using a toolbar option or a keyboard shortcut (Alt + W).

The extension in question is the Chrome Toolbox Options, which also provides with several other interesting features to enhance your Google Chrome experience including preventing Google Chrome from closing down when you close the last tab and more.

The “Mute all tabs” is definitely a great feature, but what if you want to now find and close the tab which is playing the loud music or video? Are you going to go through each individual tab and find the culprit? Well, that would take a long time. Well, another extension called “Mute Tab” can come in handy.

Mute Tab is an extension   which will allow you to find out which tabs are playing videos, music or flash and then allow you to mute them. This is definitely handy if you want to find a culprit tab and shut it down rather than having to browse through individual tabs.

That’s it, using these two extensions will save you a lot of trouble, and probably embarrassment when you are using Google Chrome. Do feel free to post your own suggestions if you use different methods to get rid of this annoyance.

Remote desktop utilities are indispensable, if you often find yourself in a situation where you need immediate control of a remote computer. Maybe your mom is just beginning to learn how Windows 8 works and you don’t want to attend half a dozen phone calls in office, just to answer really basic questions. Or if your business client is not as tech savvy as you are, save yourself from the frustration of writing emailable tech support and do the stuff right from your own computer.

For a remote desktop connection to work, you need two things. An Always ONInternet connection and a remote desktop utility which will connect your computer with a remote computer via an authorization access code. There are quite a good number of remote desktop applications for Windows, Linux and MAC but most of them have the disadvantage of not supporting all platforms and operating systems. You want a single application which can provide remote support on any operating system – be that Linux, MAC or a primitive Windows computer. At the same time, you don’t want the app to be messy and bundled with tons of settings and useless features. That’s because the person on the other side is most likely to be clueless about these options and he will ring you back to know Where should I click?

The Chrome remote desktop extension by Google changes all this.

Chrome remote desktop allows users to get access to another computer or share their own computer with anyone else, using a secured one time authentication code. You can use the extension to provide tech support to anyone who is using Google Chrome or a Chromebook, and has the extension installed.

Here is how to get started with the Chrome remote desktop extension:

1. Install the extension, sign in with your Google account and grant extended access permissions to your computer by hitting the Continuebutton:

2. On the next page, hit Allow access

3. If you want to let your computer act as the host computer, click on Share this computer. This will launch the app in a new browser tab and you will be given a one time access verification code, as shown in the following screenshots:

To let your partner gain access to your computer, pass this one time 12 digit access verification code via email or IM (don’t tweet though). When your partner has access to your Chrome remote access code, he can click on Access a shared computer, enter the code and see your desktop in a new chrome tab on his computer.

As a remote user, you will be able to completely control the entire host computer from your remote desktop, and not just the browser where the remote desktop app is running. You can open up Windows start menu, create new files, browse through Windows explorer, install applications, delete files and folders, access the command prompt and perform any action on the remote computer. It works the same way as other remote desktop utilities work, the difference lies in the fact that this one works directly from your browser and requires one time installation only (if you are using Google Chrome sync that is).

Google says that the goal of this beta release is to demonstrate the core Chrome remote technology and get feedback from users. Additional use cases such as being able to access your own computer from another remote computer are coming soon.

In 2009, Google added it’s own dictionary, called Google Dictionary. Many people used it and loved some of the features, such as the ability to “star” some entries and recall them later.

On August 5th, Google suddenly declared that it had shut down Google Dictionary. This prompted a flurry of questions in the Google support forums. One person in particular voiced their concern in a big way:

You shut down “Google Dictionary”. I HATE you for the first time.

If you go to the Dictionary site now, you’ll see Google’s sweet little message telling you that “Google Dictionary is no longer available.”

In response to a few furious users, Google employees responded with the following explanations.

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, we’ve recently introduced a dictionary tool into Google Web Search to help you quickly look up the definition of a word,. Because the dictionary tool offers the same functionality as Google Dictionary, we’ve decided to discontinue dictionary.google.com.

For your definition needs, you can type your query right into the search box and use the dictionary tool located in the left-hand panel on the results page, or you can type [define (your word)] right into the search box.

I want to thank those of who who’ve been loyal users of dictionary.google.com and welcome you to share your feedback on how the dictionary tool can be improved.

Cheers,

Kelly

Google is right about that. You can still access most of the same functions from the normal search box at Google.com, by typing the word “define” in front of the word you want to search for, as shown in the following image.

If you click on the word “More >>” at the end of the first result, you’ll be tossed over to what’s left of the now defunct Google Dictionary page. So, all is not lost, except for the “star” feature.

There are some nice alternatives if you still want quick access to dictionary definitions. The first one is the Google Dictionary extension for Google Chrome web browser. This extension allows you to double click on any word in a web page and get a quick pop-up definition. It’s very nice, and once again, clicking on the “More >>” link sends you over to the old Google Dictionary page.

If you are using the Firefox web browser, I recommend the Answer.com addon. After installing it, point at any word, hold the Alt key (Ctrl in Linux) and click. A pop-up will appear on the screen, explaining the term.

Now you can comfortably keep on HATING Google, while looking up every crazy word in the world.