WEB SPECIAL ....Boost your web surfing with these innovative extensions

Boost your web surfing with these innovative extensions

The software programs can not only customise your browsing experience, but also contribute to your productivity online. They are free and definitely worth a try

Screen/page capture

Full Page Screen Capture

Lots of webpages scroll on and on, and if you need to capture what the whole thing looks like, it may seem impossible. But Full Page Screen Capture will do it, scrolling through the page for you and capturing a JPG image. Just don’t use your mouse while it auto-scrolls the page.

Mercury Reader

If you hate pages full of ads and weird formatting, install Mercury Reader. With a click it reduces the ‘noise’ on the page so you can see only the text you want to read, with a typeface you can manage. You can share what’s left via social media, or send it to your Kindle to read later.

Google services

Boomerang for Gmail

Ever written a Gmail message and wished you could schedule it to go out a few hours later? Boomerang handles that for you, and you don’t have to be online when it sends. You can track replies, but you only get a limited number of free messages per month.

Google Translate

Ever visit a foreign website and wish you could read it? For certain languages, Chrome will automatically offer to translate the whole page to the language of your choice. With the extension, though, you can highlight a line of text and translate just that.

Interface/utilities

Highly Highlighter

If you like highlighting passages in a book or document to make them more readable, or to share with others, then you should install the Highly Highlighter extension — it lets you highlight from a website as well.

AdBlock and Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is a communitydriven extension ported from Firefox. On the other hand, it blocks video ads on sites such as YouTube and Flash-based games. The Adblock Plus, however, whitelists some ads it deems ‘acceptable’.

Productivity

DuckDuckGo for Chrome

Because it doesn’t track you like Google does, DuckDuckGo is a search engine liked by those with serious privacy concerns. With this extension installed, a Google search also shows the top results for DuckDuckGo, or you can go to search with DDG by clicking the drop-down menu.

Pushbullet

Notifications are important for mobile and desktop users, but they are seldom in sync. Pushbullet hopes to change that. You will see calls come in even on your desktop, be able to forward files from PC to smartphone, and even send SMS texts from your desktop.

in.pcmag.com

ET 12MAR18