Chrome was the only browser to gain significant usage share last month, and again trounced rival open-source Firefox.

By the end of April, Chrome accounted for 6.7% of the browsers that surfed to the sites that California-based NetApplications monitors for its clients. Chrome boosted its share by 0.6 percentage points, by far the largest increase of any browser for the month, and the second-highest increase since Google launched the program in September 2008.

Virtually all of Chrome's April expansion came at the expense of Microsoft 's Internet Explorer (IE), which dropped 0.7 percentage points to finish the month at 59.95%, the first time that IE has fallen under the 60% mark. IE's decline was less than the previous month -- it lost nearly a full point of share in March -- but was still above its average monthly decline.

Mozilla's Firefox, on the other hand, was up last month, albeit by only 0.07 percentage points to 24.6%. April was the second month in a row that Firefox trended up, a victory of sorts after losing ground for four straight months starting in November 2009.

Once considered a lock to make, then move beyond the 25% bar, Firefox has yet to reach the milestone. Last month, Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of NetApplications, noted that Firefox was "just holding steady," and gains that had once come easily to it were instead heading Chrome's way. That appeared to be the case again in April.

Mozilla's bright spot was that it has convinced nearly two-thirds of its users to upgrade to the newest Firefox 3.6, which launched in January. By the end of April, 62.3% of all Firefox users were running the newest edition, while 23.6% ran 2009's Firefox 3.5 and 11.2% ran the now-unsupported Firefox 3.0.

Microsoft's newest browser also showed strong gains last month as it grew by one percentage point to 24.7%; when its "compatibility view" is included, IE8 accounted for 27.6% of all browsers. The older IE6 and IE7 both lost share in April, ending at 17.6% and 12.5%, respectively. IE7's losses are slowing, however; its three-month average decline is less than half that of the 12-month average.

IE6, which celebrates its nine-year anniversary this August, continues to lose share, but by NetApplications' numbers, it will be a force for some time. If IE6 stays on its downward pace of the last three months, the aged browser won't slip under 10% until the summer of 2012.

Apple 's Safari posted a small increase in April, but remained at 4.7%. Meanwhile, Opera Software's desktop browser lost share to end the month at 2.3%.

Via Computerworld

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Do you have a favorite Yahoo! E-mail account or services that you like to keep up with throughout the day? Then join us as we take a look at the Yahoo Mail for Google Chrome extension.

Accessing Your Yahoo! Account

If you are not already signed into Yahoo! in your browser then you will need to login when accessing the drop-down window.



As soon as you are signed in the first thing that you will see will be your “Inbox”.

Note: The only problem we noticed during our tests was the slowness of the “Toolbar Button” to display the “Unread E-mails Count”.



Before going further one of the nice things about the extension is the ability to have the drop-down window pop out into a new but small separate window (use the “link” in the upper left corner). For our example we chose to use the pop out window.



The pop out window is much easier to work with in comparison to the drop-down window.



When viewing your e-mail it will be displayed in a mobile format with a clickable link to view the letter in full HTML if desired. You can use the “Up & Down Arrow Buttons” to easily navigate through the letters in your “Inbox”.



You can use the “Actions Menu” to sort your e-mail in an appropriate manner such as marking as read, marking as spam, adding a flag, etc. If needed you can access letters in your “Folders” using the “Folders Button”.



Looking very nice.



Composing and sending e-mails is also very easy to do.



Time for a look at the Yahoo! Services available…simply click on the “Home Link” in the upper right corner to get started. Clicking on “Home” will take you to the “Today Tab” where you can conduct a Yahoo! Search or view the latest news headlines.



A “Desktop Format” is available but definitely not recommended.



The “My Favourites Tab” lets you add your location, have quick access to your “Inbox” or messenger, links for connecting to Yahoo! Updates or Buzz, and add additional items to your Favourites.



Want to access other Yahoo! Sites & Services? Just click on the “All Sites Tab” and choose your favorite.



Settings

The only settings available concern mobile video playback.



Conclusion

If you like keeping up with your Yahoo! E-mail and favorite services throughout the day then the Yahoo Mail for Google Chrome extension will make a very nice addition to your browser.

Links

Download the Yahoo Mail for Google Chrome extension (Google Chrome Extensions)

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Tab is an useful functionality in all browsers, but when you have more than 20 tabs opened, you will know that it is not an easy task to manage them all. Most of the time will be spent searching for a particular tab then reading the content. If you are looking for ways to ease your tabs burden, here are 10 useful tabs management extensions that you can use in your Chrome browser.

1. TooManyTabs

If you have used TooManyTabs in Firefox, you will love this similar extension for Chrome too. They are from the same developers, but this TMT for Chrome is much more visually pleasing than the Firefox version.



When clicked, TMT will show a window containing all the opened tabs in your current session. You can then click on any tabs that you have currently no use for to move it to the suspended tabs section. The tab state will be saved and memory will be released for other usage. At any point of time, you can easily retrieve back your suspended tabs (and its saved state) by clicking on it in the right column.

2. QuickTabs

When your tab list get longer and longer, you no longer can see the favicon and the title of the tab. When such things happen, Quick Tabs will come in handy. Quick Tabs lists all your tabs in a vertical dropdown fashion and you can easily scroll down to locate the tab you want. In addition, it also comes with a search bar for you to search your opened tabs.



What I really like about this extension is the availability of keyboard shortcuts and the option to choose how many tabs to display in the list. I can easily press Ctrl + M to open the popup window or Ctrl + d to close a tab shortcut.

Personally, I have not reached the tabs nirvana stage where I need to search for my opened tabs, but for those who are into tabs surfing, this is a really useful extension. Another similar extension is Tab Menu.

3. Sexy Undo Close Tab

For those who are tired of going to the History section to retrieve your closed tabs, this extension is going to be very useful. What it does is to show you a list of tabs that you have previously closed so you can retrieve it quickly and easily.



In the settings, you can choose how many closed tabs to display. One thing though, the closed tab list is only valid for the current session. If you restart your Chrome (or start a new session), the previous closed tab list will be gone.

4. Tabs to the front!

In usual situation, when you click a link to open in a new tab, you will still need to click on the new tab to make it the active tab. Tabs to the front! automatically make the newly created tab the active tab and it saves you the effort to click on it.

5. TabJump

When working with many tabs at the same time, it’s hard to remember which one you want to go next. TabJump highlights frequently used tabs and related tabs so you can easily jump between them. In addition, TabJump store your recently closed tabs in the same list so you can easily retrieve them.



For your info, the developer of TabJump is the same as TooManyTabs.

6. TabsPlus

Usually, when you click to open a new tab, it will open itself in the right side of the current tab. It will also open in the background and you have to click it to make it active. Now, if you want to change the behavior of the tab opening, then TabsPlus is the one for you. With TabsPlus, you can select whether to open the new tab as the first tab (extreme left) or as the last tab (extreme right). You can also choose to open in the background or foreground.

7. Session Manager

This Session Manager extension allows you to save your current session (opened tabs and windows) and restore them later. You can save multiple sessions.

8. New Tab Redirect!

With New Tab Redirect, you can now set a custom URL to load in new tabs.  You can choose from Chrome’s about pages, a few popular URLs, or provide your own. Your custom tab can also be a local file, allowing you to create your own new tab page.



Of course, if you are using extensions like Speed Dial, this extension won’t work.

9. Tab wrangler

Tab Wrangler closes a tab if it has inactive for a period time. This is useful if you have the habit of opening many tabs and forget to close them later. The default time is 7 minutes, but you can change it in the settings.

10. JoinTabs

JoinTabs come in the form of an icon where you can click to combine the tabs from different Chrome windows into one window. It works also with popup windows, but not pinned tabs. For those who want this feature to run automatically in the background, you can try the JoinTabs No Icon.

Which extensions do you use to manage your tabs in Chrome?

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Do you want a very quick and simple way to access your Google Tasks account in Chrome? Then see just how easy it can be with the Task List extension.

Installation

During the installation process you will see the following confirmation message window…click “Install” to finish adding Task List to Chrome.



After the extension has finished installing you will see your new “Task List Toolbar Button” and an extension management message.



As you can see here there are no options for you to worry with. All that you have to do is enjoy easy access to your Tasks account…



Task List in Action

To access Google Tasks all that you need to do is click on the “Toolbar Button” and you will see a “Tasks Pop-up Window” like this. If you want (or need to) you can minimize Chrome itself and only have the “Tasks Pop-up Window” visible. That is a very nice feature…



Here is a close look at the “Tasks Pop-up Window”…in the lower left corner you can access the “Actions Menu”…



And in the lower right corner you can “Add a Task”, “Delete a Task”, and access the “List Switch Menu”.



Adding new tasks is very easy…type in your task and hit “Enter” for the next new task. You can also add additional details or notes for each individual task using the “Greater Than Arrow” on the right side.



This is the “Details Area” for tasks. You can add a “Due Date”, “Notes”, or “Move the Task to a New/Different List”. Click on “Back to list” when you have finished editing the details.



If you are curious about synchronization with your Tasks account then you will be pleased to know that what we added to the “Tasks Pop-up Window” immediately appeared in the regular account window. Very nice indeed…



If you have finished a task then you can easily “cross it out” by clicking in the little box on the left side…



Conclusion

If you have been looking for a quick and easy way to access your Google Tasks account in Chrome, then you are going to love this extension. This is definitely a recommended install…

Links

Download the Task List extension (Google Chrome Extensions)

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Are you tired of having to open external text programs every time you need to save a few notes? Now you can add a “built-in” notepad to Google Chrome with the Chromepad extension.

Installation

You will be prompted with the following message window asking you to confirm installation of the extension. Click “Install” to finish adding Chromepad to Google Chrome…



Once installation is complete you will see this message displayed along with your new “Toolbar Button”.



Options

You can use one of three methods to access the options for Chromepad. The first is by right clicking on the “Toolbar Icon”, the second is using the “Chrome Extensions Page”, and the third is using the menu in the drop-down window itself.



This is what the “Options Page” currently looks like. The main area of interest is the “LocalStorage Text Box”…



If you have had notes from an older version of the extension “disappear” when you update to the newest version then they will be found here. You can “re-add” them back to the drop-down window. This is an example from one of our portable installs when we updated to the newest version…



Chromepad in Action

When you click on the “Chromepad Toolbar Button” you will see a small drop-down text window like this. There is also a small and very useful menu included.



If you need to resize the window while adding notes you can do so easily using the “Extend Grip” in the lower right corner of the text window.

Note: The drop-down window will return to the default size shown above when closed and then reopened.



At the moment you can not select a default font for the text so your text may appear slightly different based on the font settings in your browser. As you can see the notes that we typed for our example look very nice. What is even better is that your notes are saved for the next time (after you restart your browser)…simply open the text window and start where you previously left off.

Note: You will not be able to add images to the notes.



If you prefer you can even detach the drop-down window from the browser…definitely a nice touch.



Conclusion

Chromepad is an extremely useful (and highly recommended) extension for Google Chrome to help you keep track of the notes that you collect throughout the day.

Links

Download the Chromepad extension (Google Chrome Extensions)

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Does single click access to your browsing history in Google Chrome sound great? Then you should take a look at the History Button extension.

Before

Usually there are two methods for viewing your browsing history in Chrome:

• Using the “Tools Menu” to access the “History Page”


• Performing keyboard ninja magic with the “Ctrl + H” keyboard shortcut

But what if neither method really appeals to you? Perhaps a “Toolbar Button” is just what you have been looking for.



Installation

During the install process you will be asked to confirm installation of the extension. Click “Install” to finish adding your new “History Button” to Chrome.



As soon as you have finished installing the extension you will see your new “History Toolbar Button” and the following message.



There are no options for you to worry with… All that you have to do is just enjoy that single click access goodness.



After

With very minimal impact to your browser’s UI you can now easily access your browsing history.



Conclusion

While this may not be something that everyone will like, the History Button extension makes a very nice addition to Chrome for those prefer to use a toolbar button instead of menus or keyboard shortcuts.

Links

Download the History Button extension (Google Chrome Extensions)

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