Basic Browser Buff-ups

So we all have our pet peeves-those things that makes us want to smack our loved ones and random strangers upside the head. For your sake, I'm just gonna cover one now, because the list could go on forever...

It drives me crazy the way people use their browsers. It's bad enough when they're using some ancient browser when there are so many great browsers out there (see this awesome website that taxes buyers still using IE7) but seeing people use great browsers and not taking advantage of any of the cool things they can do? Aaaagh!!!!!! It makes me crazy.

So here are some basic things that I think everyone should take a look at and consider using with their browsers. I work mainly with Chrome and use Firefox as backup for some things so I'm really going to be mainly focusing on Chrome but Firefox has an equivalent for pretty much everything.

Extensions

Extensions are super easy to add and can be found in the Chrome webstore and addons for Firefox. Take a look to find ones that work with the websites and tools that you use. I'm just going to list a few basic ones below.

Adblock Plus for Chrome		Adblock for Chrome

These extensions will take care of the ads that'll slow down your browser or are just plain annoying. After working a week with these installed it'll be painful to go back to anything else.

WOT (Web of Trust)

This extension will show you which websites you can trust-although it's not entirely accurate all the time because most of its data is user constructed, it does a pretty fair job of warning away from dangerous sites.

Notifications

Adding notification extensions can help keep you updated on your email, on schedule, and keep up with your social networking sites.

Checker Plus for Gmail		Checker Plus for Google Calendar		Facebook Notifications

Messing with your search engines

A great thing about Chrome (this can be done in Firefox as well) is that you can use the ombnibox (search bar) to majorly speed everyday tasks. There's a ton of stuff you can do-from looking up information on different websites to adding an event onto your Google calendar. And it's not that complicated to add search engines.

1. Right click in the search bar and select 'Edit search engines'
2. This will bring up the 'Search engines' window under Settings
3. To add a search engine, you will need to fill out three different fields:
• 'Add a new search engine' - the text put there will show up once you've brought up the search engine.
• keyword is the text that you type into the search bar to bring up the search engine. 
• The URL is the tricky part. Some sites will automatically add their own search engines but for some more complicated tasks the URL's will be a little more complicated.

So here are a few of my favorites that I use all the time :

Google calendar quickadd (keyword: gcal)

URL: http://www.google.com/calendar/event?ctext=+%s+&action=TEMPLATE&pprop=HowCreated%3AQUICKADD

Google Scholar Lookup (keyword: scholar) 
URL: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%s&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C21&as_sdtp=

Google Maps (keyword: maps)
URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s&hl=en&emb=0&sa=N&tab=vl

Wikipedia Lookup (keyword: wiki)
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

Of course all this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tailoring your browser but I've tried to cover things that I think everyone can use and that can make you more productive. Let me know what you think-are there other basic things that you think everyone should be aware of?