Google Chrome Stable Channel updated to 17.0.963.46 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame.

Important Note: Bookmark this page (Press CTRL + D) to always Get the latest update about Google Chrome Stable Channel for all platforms.

According to the Google Chrome Releases blog, Chrome 17 comes loaded with a number of new features and security features. The new features includes new extensions APIs, updated omnibox pre-rendering, download scanning protection and many other small changes.

Chrome 17 now pre-renders pages in the background as you start typing the URL in the omnibox address bar. This makes the website seem to appear almost instantly. Another new feature is the download scanning protection. Chrome now automatically scans downloaded executable files like .exe files and gives a warning if it thinks the file is malicious.

Security and bug fixes in Chrome 17

• [73478] Low CVE-2011-3953: Avoid clipboard monitoring after paste event.
• [92550] Low CVE-2011-3954: Crash with excessive database usage.
• [93106] High CVE-2011-3955: Crash aborting an IndexDB transaction.
• [103630] Low CVE-2011-3956: Incorrect handling of sandboxed origins inside extensions.
• [104056] High CVE-2011-3957: Use-after-free in PDF garbage collection.
• [105459] High CVE-2011-3958: Bad casts with column spans.
• [106441] High CVE-2011-3959: Buffer overflow in locale handling.
• [108416] Medium CVE-2011-3960: Out-of-bounds read in audio decoding.
• [108871] Critical CVE-2011-3961: Race condition after crash of utility process.
• [108901] Medium CVE-2011-3962: Out-of-bounds read in path clipping.
• [109094] Medium CVE-2011-3963: Out-of-bounds read in PDF fax image handling.
• [109245] Low CVE-2011-3964: URL bar confusion after drag + drop.
• [109664] Low CVE-2011-3965: Crash in signature check.
• [109716] High CVE-2011-3966: Use-after-free in stylesheet error handling.
• [109717] Low CVE-2011-3967: Crash with unusual certificate.
• [109743] High CVE-2011-3968: Use-after-free in CSS handling.
• [110112] High CVE-2011-3969: Use-after-free in SVG layout.
• [110277] Medium CVE-2011-3970: Out-of-bounds read in libxslt.
• [110374] High CVE-2011-3971: Use-after-free with mousemove events.
• [110559] Medium CVE-2011-3972: Out-of-bounds read in shader translator.

The bugs [105459], [106441], [108416], [108901], [109716], [109743], [110112], [110277], [110374]  and [110559] were detected using AddressSanitizer. For more details you can view the post at Chrome Releases blog.

If you’re already a Chrome user, most likely your browser is silently updated to the latest version. If you want to download and install Chrome, you can do so by clicking on the relevant download links below.

Latest Google Chrome Stable Channel Download Links For All Platforms

You can download the latest version of Google Chrome using following link:

Download Google Chrome (Web installer)

Download Google Chrome for All Users (Enterprise Edition)

If you want to download the Google Chrome offline installer instead of the web installer, you can get it using following link:

Download Google Chrome Offline Standalone Installer

Do check out the Google Chrome category to see everything about the web browser.

Google Chrome has finally arrived for Android mobile devices.

On Tuesday, in an official Google Chrome blog post, the company announced the release of Chrome Web browser for Android app. While announcing, the company said that like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity. The new browser features seamless sign-in and sync to make sure you get the same personalized web browsing experience wherever you go, across devices.

Actually, the Chrome Beta app is only available for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) phone or tablet. So, if you fall in the 99% of Android device users who still don’t have ICS, you’re out of luck. Further if you don’t live in United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil but have ICS, you’ll not be able to find and download the app from the Android Market. It seems Google wants to limit the beta version to as few users as possible.

Chrome Web browser app will serve as an alternative to the default Android Web browser, with an uninspiring title “Browser.” Just like the desktop version, the app features tabbed browsing, lets you search and navigate from the omnibox, browse privately in Incognito mode. When you sign in to Chrome, the app syncs your bookmarks and lets you view tabs you have open on your computer.

Some cool additions were also made to the mobile version. You can open and switch between unlimited tabs in an easy-to-view stack. You can also send pages from desktop Chrome to your smartphone or tablet with one click and read them on the go, even if you’re offline.

Excited about the official Chrome web app for your Android? Are you testing the beta version on your Ice Cream Sandwich device? Let us know which features of the app you liked or hated any of them? If you fall in the major number of Android users who can’t yet test the app, are you disappointed? Let us know in the comments below.

Are you already touching the Google+ limit of 5000 people in your circles? Do you want to do some clean up and get rid of all the inactive people? Uncircle+ is a Google Chrome extension for you.

Uncircle+ lets you uncircle people (i.e. remove) inactive people from your Google+ circle with ease. So, if you want to add new people to your circles, you can add them without reaching the 5000 limit.

Do note that the “Inactive people” here referred by the author of the extension, are those people in your circles who have not shared any posts (original, reshare, private or public posts) with you. So, if that person is having at least one post, he is active. Thus, after doing the housekeeping with this extension, if you want to further cleanup “dormant” accounts, you have to do so manually. We are referring “dormant” here are those people who have not shared any post for a long time after they signed up.

How to use Uncircle+ to remove inactive people from your Google+ circles?

1. Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store. You will see an icon of Uncircle+ on the toolbar.
2. Sign in to your Google+ account and click on that icon.
3. Uncircle+ will open up a new tab where it displays the status of each steps being performed. It starts collecting a list of people whom you’ve added to your circles.
4. Now, click on the Find Inactive People! button. It will start checking the activity of all the people found in your circles.
5. After the analysis is complete, it displays a list of inactive people and lets you select which ones to remove.
6. Clicking on the Remove Selected button starts removing the selected inactive people from your circle.

Do check out the 10 best Google+ extensions for experiencing the best of Google Plus. As you are busy removing inactive people from your circles, why don’t you add me to your circle?

A word of caution, before removing, do check the list. Don’t blame us if something goes wrong. Happy hunting… Thanks to Kimberly Castleberry.

10 best Google Chrome Extensions for all the Google+ users out there! Try them all to enhance your Google+ experience.

Google+ (Google Plus), now in field trial and is an invite-only social network project by Google. Within weeks after its first launch, it has attracted over 10 million users and 1 billion items being shared per day. Though Google is yet to release an API for Google+ but many developers have already developed extensions for enhancing the user-interface of the social network project. The list of extensions, plugins and userscripts are not limited to Google Chrome only. This article is a summary of the best 10 Google+ extensions available for Google+ users. These best Google+ Chrome extensions improves overall interaction, navigation, sharing and social interactions for a richer experience.

How to add these Google Chrome extensions?

Just click on the names of the extensions we have covered here. You will be taken to their respective Chrome web store page. Click on the big blue Install button to install them. To manage the extensions, simply click on the spanner icon (Tools) than under Tools, click on Extensions. You can directly visit the extensions page by typing chrome://extensions in the address bar and pressing Enter.

Best 10 Google Chrome Extensions for Google+ (Google Plus) users.

G+me for Google Plus

Google+ Stream displays all the messages from people in your Circles (if it is shared with you). But sometimes, you may not be able to cope up with the information overload, caused by the real-time updates of comments under the message. G+me for Google Plus solves this problem by collapsing the messages. It is great enhancement to work with real-time large stream of messages and comments. Other notable enhancements it brings to Google+ are:

• Notification status visible at all times: Browser icon shows badge with number of new notifications.
• Collapsible comments: Always-visible button makes 100s of comments easy to hide.
• Collapsible posts: An alternative to muting, this is great if you’re not interested in seeing a post but still want to get back to it later and/or still want to get notifications.
• Real-time comment count on collapsed items: Track the number of seen or unseen comments, whether you like to collapse posts and comments.
• Mark comments as read: Collapsing posts/comments automatically keeps track of comments you’ve seen; the extension remembers.
• List-mode option keeps at most one post displayed: This turns the stream into a dashboard.
• Mouse-over instant preview: In list mode, hover the mouse over a collapsed post to get a fully functional preview on the side.

Usability Boost for Google Plus

Usability Boost for Google+ is a Chrome extension that makes small CSS changes to the user interface. These changes help you put your focus on the content, separating visually posts and comments. It keeps the Google Notification bar at a fixed place on top. So, even when you’re scrolling down the page, you’ll never miss a notification again. For more convenience, it displays a direct link to mute post. The extension makes the following changes that are visible right away:

• A grey background that substitute the white one and create a nice contrast between the post and the background
• A little spacing between post to clearly difference them
• A blue background in comments, like Facebook
• The likes are highlighted with a white background and red letters
• A direct link to Mute posts

It also offer three options that you can disable/enable from the extension option’s menu: Fixed Top Bar, Grey background and Direct access to mute link.

Native GMail for Google Plus

Native GMail for Google Plus is a Google Plus extension for Google Chrome browser that adds email notifications next to your Google username on the Google navigation bar. It shows total number of new emails received, when you click on the notification, a drop down list appears with details about the email(s) received. The email notifications only appears on your Google+ page and not on any other Google service page. Using the extension’s option you can set how soon it should check for new emails and if it should keep checking even when you aren’t on your Google+ page.

Google Plus Bar Minus

Google Plus Bar Minus extension is useful for those Google+ users who wants to disable or hide the black Google navigation bar on their Google+ page. Using a single click on the extension you can turn on or off the Google navigation bar. Just turn off the black Google+ nav bar to get more real estate on the screen. This extension will be useful for everyone who are using the various notification extensions featured on this article.

+Comment Toggle

+Comment Toggle is a good and useful Google Plus extension for Google Chrome browser. It helps you hide comments to posts within your Stream and when you actually want to see them you can toggle the option. Like G+me (which we have covered above), this plugin automatically hides all comments on a post.

Helper for Google+

This extension tweaks Chrome search and lets you share on Twitter. Helper gives you desktop notifications for new Google+ posts as pop-up window or an audio alert. The extension offers the following enhancements to Google Plus:

• Share Google+ Posts with people on twitter.
• Translate posts with Google Translate to language specified by you.
• Notifier – Get desktop notifications on new posts, also with sound. (mouse over notification to freeze it).
• Bookmark Google+ posts for reading them later.
• Bookmark posts on Delicious.
• Linked hashtags in posts for better search.
• Search in Google+ posts and profiles directly from your omnibox (address box), just type the search keyword “plus” (excluding the quotes) and type your search query.

+Photo Zoom

+Photo Zoom is another very handy Google Plus extension for Chrome which enables image zooming on mouse over. +Photo Zoom provides fast and simple zooming for photos within your Google+ Stream. Just hover over the image you wish to zoom and +Photo Zoom will load the enlarged version of the picture saving you extra clicks to view them.

Search Extension for Google Plus

This extension enables you to search Google Plus public contents online. The extension can filter profiles, posts, posts from Buzz and posts from Google Reader. The results page is neatly arranged into tabs featuring all results, results from Google+ posts, profiles, Google Buzz and Google Reader.

GTools+

GTools+ is a Chrome extension that adds many useful features to Google Plus. Using this extension you can: stick the Google bar fixed at the top when you scroll down, translate foreign language posts, customize the notification color, change Google Chat place, add notification for Gmail and Reader and more. In all, the extension provides the following Google+ enhancements:

• Unified Google bar, your personalized menu is possible on all Google services.
• Stick the Google+ bar always on top when you scrolling.
• Prevent open in new tab or window when you click on link inside the Google+ bar.
• Change the position of the chat for put in the Google+ Bar.
• Change the color of the notification bubble in the Google+ Bar.
• Right click on the extension icon for go to the options page fastest.
• Add a translation link in the context menu (auto detect the post language).
• Add notification for Gmail and Reader in the Google Bar.
• Edit the color of any notification bubble.

Surplus

Surplus extension allows you to easily access all your notifications, create new posts from any website. The best thing is you can do all these actions without even switching to Google site. Just click on the extension’s icon present beside the address bar of Chrome to get access to all these features. The enhancements offered by the Surplus extension are:

• Post or respond from within the pop-up of the extension.
• Desktop Notifications with notification sounds.
• Switch between multiple Google accounts.

We hope you found our compilation as useful as we have ourselves. Do you use any other extension or userscript? Share it with us, we will love to test it.

You can follow me on Google+

Google Docs Viewer recently added support for viewing ZIP and RAR archive files online. With these two additions, Google Docs Viewer can now display 17 file formats in your browser. If you simply want to view the contents of ZIP or RAR archive files or just want to extract some files, you can now do so using the viewer.

Now, you might be wondering how to view the contents of the archive files using the viewer. If the archive was sent to you through email to your Gmail account, you can easily open it using Docs viewer. Now, lets you have just seen a very good freeware available in an archive file for download. You can always go ahead and click on the download button to download it. But why don’t take the advantage of Google Docs viewer and see beforehand whats inside that archive? It would have been time-consuming to do that manually, but thanks to the “Open ZIP and RAR With GDocs” Chrome extension, you can now easily view whats inside that ZIP or RAR archive file before downloading it.

The extension aptly titled “Open ZIP and RAR with GDocs” allows you to view the contents directly in your browser using Google Docs viewer. Once installed, it add an entry to the context menu of Google Chrome. So, the next time you run into a ZIP or RAR file and you want to see what’s inside before downloading it, just right-click on the link of the archive and select “Open with Google Docs.” A new tab will open showing the contents of the archive file in Google Docs viewer. You can now browse through the contents, download files, save in your Google Docs account, and if the content is a supported file type you can view even view it in Google Docs.

Open ZIP and RAR With GDocs is a very useful Google Chrome extension which allows opening any ZIP or RAR file hosted online using Google Docs.

You can download Open ZIP and RAR With GDocs for Google Chrome from the Chrome Apps page.

Google has launched a number of changes including a black nav-bar with gray font color, the navigation bar present at the top, which links to many Google services. But for many users this contrasting change is unacceptable unlike many who loved it. They want to get back good old white navigation bar. For those users who wants to get back the old interface, here’s a very quick tip (actually a userscript).

Google Light Navbar userscript restores back the original white nav-bar and blue font color on all Google pages. The userscript works in the Firefox, Chrome and Opera web browser. Here’s how to get the userscript working on your favorite browser.

New black nav-bar

Old white nav-bar back after using the script

Simply download Google Light Navbar userscript from http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/105735 and install it.

Firefox users will first need to install Greasemonkey or Scriptish add-on before they can install and use the script.

Chrome users can directly visit the userscript page and install it to instantly use it.

Opera users will need to specify a directory on their computer where they put userscript in, if they haven’t done so already.

You can do so by clicking on the Opera button, than on Settings, Preferences, Advanced, Content, JavaScript Options. Now browse to specify the directory. Download the script and put it into the directory specified for use.

The userscript works without restarting the browser. If you are having the page open already, you may need to reload the page to see the changes in effect.

The author of the script also mentions that the user is free to customize the nav-bar color to any color of their choice.

For changing the color, click on the spanner icon on the far right of the bar and click on the colors to change the hex values of the colors. [via]

Google Instant is a new type of search enhancement provided by Google that shows results as you type. Instant will help you get better search results, faster and can save 2-5 seconds per search. It predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions – yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.

Google Instant is available to signed-in users in over 50 countries and for signed-out users in select regions who use the following browsers: Chrome v5 or higher, Firefox v3/4, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8/9. In this article, we will show you, how you can get Google Instant search results right in the Chrome’s omnibox (the address bar).

Features

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction shown in gray text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

Enable Google Instant in Chrome web browser

1. Click on the spanner icon to get access to Tools menu, select Options/Preferences.
2. Under Basic, look for “Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing” check box in the Search section.

   

3. Select the check box to enable Google Instant.
4. You don’t have to do anything else, simply start typing in the omnibox. If Google is set as the default search engine, you will start getting suggestions by Google.

Disable Google Instant in Chrome web browser

To disable Google Instant in Chrome, simply follow the above first 2 steps. For the third step, simply deselect the check box and Instant will be disabled.

Earlier, we have shown you how to disable Flash completely in Google Chrome without using any plugin. But that method had a disadvantage. What if you want to have flash enabled for certain pages or websites like YouTube?

For this reason, we have come up with another useful tip for you. This method again doesn’t need you to download any third-party extension for Google Chrome. Instead it will show you how to use in-built Chrome feature intelligently to disable flash in your browser.

We will use Google Chrome’s in-built Click to Play feature for this tutorial. Using this method, you will be able to block flash contents including flash ads, while having the freedom to enable flash with just a click on the flash content.

How to use Chrome’s Click to Play feature to disable Flash?

1. First, open Google Chrome window if you haven’t done so yet.

2. Next, open a new tab in the browser, type about:flags and press Enter.

3. Now, in the about:flags page, scroll down until you find “Click to Play.”

   

4. Click on the link that says “Enable” to enable Click to Play in Google Chrome.

5. Now, scroll all the way to then end of this page. Click on the Relaunch Now button to restart Google Chrome and apply settings.

   

6. After Google Chrome reopens, click on the spanner icon to get access to Tools menu, select Options/Preferences.

7. Under Preferences, click on “Under the Hood.”

   

8. Now, select “Content Settings” button present in the Privacy section.

   

9. Select the Click to Play option under Plug-ins.

10. Everything is configured now! Enjoy flash free browsing and only enable flash when you need to.

    

11. To enable flash for a particular content, simply click on it.

Do you have any good tips to share about Google Chrome? Share them below, we will love to know about them. We may also include them in one of our next article, including your name.

Web browsers are the primary application used to browse the Internet by all users. Hence, it’s attacked the most from various forms of malicious threats. The most common example that we can see is when computer systems are getting infected without user’s knowledge during web browsing.

Even though most security systems are capable of blocking this attacks but, isn’t it a better idea to prevent the infection from the browser itself? BitDefender TrafficLight warns users about malicious websites and filters malicious web traffic.

Although, almost every major antivirus company offers similar solution today, but BitDefender TrafficLight has one key advantage over them: it’s available on all five major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

Another deferential feature of BitDefender TrafficLight is that, the program installs itself as a service in Windows. This service than carefully monitors and analyzes the web traffic before the web browser even executes the codes. TrafficLight displays only a small slide-out grab tab that you can click to display its analysis of the current page. When malicious activity is detected, TrafficLight will spring into action and prevent the offending code from executing.

On performance cause, it does need 20 to 30 MB of RAM to run, which anyone can spare when security is concerned and memory comes cheap.

List of protections covered by TrafficLight:

• Each search result from Google, Yahoo! or Bing is labeled to show the safe and risky links. TrafficLight leverages the intelligence from BitDefender Cloud services to flag the search results appropriately.
• Each click on the links from Facebook or Twitter is scanned and the link could be blocked in real-time if the link appears to be malicious.
• Link shortening tools that works with Saf.li is included to make sure only safe links are shortened.
• Detect and block links pointing to malware or phishing sites.
• Ad-blocker (To be available in future)

To install TrafficLight in your browser, visit the BitDefender site. After installing it, you’ll have an unobtrusive malware protection hiding just below your browser’s toolbar. Here’s the direct link to the installer: WebInstaller.exe

Google Chrome comes with an in-built PDF viewer for viewing PDF files. It comes very handy and many people finds this a very good feature. But there are many people who don’t want to use Chrome PDF Viewer to view PDF files, instead they are happy with their favorite PDF reader applications. If you fall into the second group of people and want to disable Chrome PDF Viewer plugin, here’s how to do it.

Open a New Tab in Google Chrome web browser.

Type about:plugins in the address bar and press Enter.

Now, find the entry for Chrome PDF Viewer, and simply click on the Disable link.

From now on Google Chrome will prompt you to download the PDF file instead of opening it. If you want to revert back and again enable Chrome PDF Viewer, simply follow the above steps and click on the Enable link.

If you are interested in also disabling the Google Chrome built-in Flash support read here for a quick solution.

Google Chrome web browser stable has been updated to 8.0.552.237 for all platforms. The latest stable release fixes several security vulnerabilities, making it a mandatory update for all Chrome stable users.

The Google Chrome Releases blog lists 16 different vulnerabilities that have been fixed in the new version of which one received the highest rating critical and 13 of high. Sergey Glazunov, the researcher who discovered the critical vulnerability has received the first “elite” Chromium Security Reward, $1337 reward and several other rewards at the same time.

The releases contain the security fixes listed below.

• [58053] Medium Browser crash in extensions notification handling. Credit to Eric Roman of the Chromium development community.
• [$1337] [65764] High Bad pointer handling in node iteration. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
• [66334] High Crashes when printing multi-page PDFs. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Chris Evans).
• [$1000] [66560] High Stale pointer with CSS + canvas. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
• [$500] [66748] High Stale pointer with CSS + cursors. Credit to Jan ToÅ¡ovský.
• [67100] High Use after free in PDF page handling. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Chris Evans).
• [$1000] [67208] High Stack corruption after PDF out-of-memory condition. Credit to Jared Allar of CERT.
• [$1000] [67303] High Bad memory access with mismatched video frame sizes. Credit to Aki Helin of OUSPG; plus independent discovery by Google Chrome Security Team (SkyLined) and David Warren of CERT.
• [$500] [67363] High Stale pointer with SVG use element. Credited anonymously; plus indepdent discovery by miaubiz.
• [$1000] [67393] Medium Uninitialized pointer in the browser triggered by rogue extension. Credit to kuzzcc.
• [$1000] [68115] High Vorbis decoder buffer overflows. Credit to David Warren of CERT.
• [$1000] [68170] High Buffer overflow in PDF shading. Credit to Aki Helin of OUSPG.
• [$1000] [68178] High Bad cast in anchor handling. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
• [$1000] [68181] High Bad cast in video handling. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
• [$1000] [68439] High Stale rendering node after DOM node removal. Credit to Martin Barbella; plus independent discovery by Google Chrome Security Team (SkyLined).
• [$3133.7] [68666] Critical Stale pointer in speech handling. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.

Interested users can find full details about the Chrome changes in the SVN revision log.

As Google Chrome gets updated automatically, most of the users are already running the latest version of Chrome. You can check which version you are running by clicking on the wrench icon and clicking on About Google Chrome. If you want you can visit the official download page to download the latest Google Chrome version. You can also download an offline version of Google Chrome from the links that we have shared in one of our earlier posts.

ChromeBlock (formerly known as Do Not Track) is a Google Chrome extension that helps you block web beacons, bugs, and other tracking technologies used by advertisers to track your browsing actions. ChromeBlock automatically looks at each web page that you load and identifies web bugs, beacons and other tracking tools that the web page has and blocks them.

You can easily see what trackers are in use at each website you visit and then block any or all of them by simply clicking on the ChromeBlock icon and toggling the option “Not Blocked Here” to “Blocked Here.”

It gives you an easy way to stop around 90 different tracking networks that includes Google, MSN, Alexa, DoubleClick, Omniture, Quantcast, Tynt, Cleeki, etc. You can also choose to block ad-networks, or you can opt-out in advance by clicking the “show global settings” link. The overlay on ChromeBlock’s browser action button tells you how many networks are detected and how many you’ve chosen to block.

Using this Chrome extension you can easily stop third-party tracking and surf the internet with complete peace of mind.

[ Download ChromeBlock for Google Chrome ]

VTchromizer is a Google Chrome add-on to scan suspicious websites, files, URLs, and more. You can do all this from within Chrome using the powerful VirusTotal web-based virus and malware scanner.

VirusTotal is a web-based virus scanner like NoVirusThanks. It pulls from the databases of 40 plus virus scanning engines and compares the results. After installing the extension a small VirusTotal logo appears on your Chrome toolbar.

VirusTotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and URLs and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. It is not a substitute for antivirus or security products, but provides a valuable second opinion on a given file or web site. It is completely free and integrates over 40 antivirus solutions and several URL scanning tools.

If you click on the VirusTotal logo, the add-on pulls up the menu (see in the screenshot below).

You can then easily scan all the links present on the site that you’re looking at, visit the VirusTotal homepage, or search the VirusTotal database using the hash of a file, a suspicious URL, an organizational tag, or the username of a VirusTotal user (to see the reports they have filed).

If you are going to download any file but you first want to check if the file is clean or not, simply right-click on the file’s download link and choose Scan with VirusTotal. Wait for the analysis to complete to see if its clean or not. Once you’ve got the all-clear message, you can confidently download your file. This protects you from potentially downloading any malware files to your computer.

If you have received a suspicious link in your email inbox or you think that the site you are currently viewing is a phishing or fraud site, you can also check it using the add-on. It lets you scan the site using VirusTotal that reports about the site using data from Firefox, G-Data, Google Safebrowsing, Opera, ParetoLogic and Phishtank services. Simply right-click on the link of the site and choose Scan with VirusTotal.

[ Download VTchromizer ]

Good news for all our readers using Google Chrome web browser. Google has released Chrome 7.0 stable version. According to the update post at Google Chrome Blog:

In this stable release, we’ve focused primarily on hundreds of bug fixes. We’ve also included a few other things that may be of interest to developers, such as full AppleScript support on Mac OS X for UI automation and implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm, the File API, and directory upload (via <input type=”file” webkitdirectory>). Also, if you choose to block sites from setting any data in your browser’s content settings for cookies, you can now use a new dialog for managing blocked cookies in bulk.

Users can download the latest stable version of Google Chrome using the links below:

Download Google Chrome (Web installer)

Download Google Chrome Offline Standalone Installer

Note: These download links above will always provide you the latest stable version of Google Chrome.

Xmarks is a bookmark sync browser add-on that lets you synchronize all your bookmarks, passwords and other data over several computers, across almost all popular browsers. I am a Xmarks user myself and use it to sync my bookmarks across all the browsers that I use. Sadly, this awesome bookmark sync service will be shutting down service on January 10, 2011.

According to the blog post update on the official Xmarks blog, from today Xmarks will start sending notifications to its users (I still haven’t received one) that the service will be shut down in 90 days. The reasons for the shutdown are explained in detail in the blog post. It can be understood that the main reasons behind shutting down Xmarks are funds running out and Xmarks being unable to find a viable business model or a buyer.

Xmarks (founded in 2006 under the original name Foxmarks) started out as a Firefox plug-in that lets users sync their bookmarks on several computers. Later, Foxmarks rechristened as Xmarks, as it extended support for other browsers and added more functionality, such as browsing recommendations and password syncing.

Xmarks claims it serves around 2 million users across 5 million desktops, and still adding nearly 3,000 new accounts per day (their registration page is still online). You may be wondering, then why Xmarks is seeing the end of the road?

Well, when big players like Google, Opera and Mozilla starts providing sync service and with most of the features that Xmarks offers, free, it becomes really difficult for startups like Xmarks to survive.

A quote from Xmarks CTO and Co-founder Todd Agulnick:

“For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down.”

Its not like the Xmarks developers never tried. They tried various ways to make a profit out of its business, including a “smarter search” idea based on data gleaned from its anonymized collection of 100 million bookmarks. “If you were looking for the Web sites in a particular category, the results were shockingly complete and entirely spam-free,” Agulnick said. They also launched a 99-cent iPhone app to extend sync to Apple’s devices and had begun work on an equivalent for phones using Google’s Android OS. Though the iPhone app will continue to work with bookmarks cached on the phone, but the Android app will never be released.

It is really sad to say good-bye to such a good service. You can easily understand this even if you are not a Xmarks user, when you see comments by users willing to pay for the service, at the official announcement blog post.

Xmarks Alternatives

If you are presently a Xmarks user, you should check Xmarks’ guide to alternatives for advice on the best way to keep your data.

Browser Sync Alternatives

While you may have to give up cross-browser sync when Xmarks goes away, there are a lot of good browser-specific sync options available:

In that page we found two suggestions by Xmarks as its alternative for users who wants more than bookmark sync: Evernote and SugarSync. Xmarks seems to have tied up with the two to offer some exclusive plans for its users. SugarSync is offering free 2 GB storage space for all Xmarks users who signup through the link available here.

Google Scribe is a new Google Labs project that helps you speed up text typing. Google Scribe basically provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a text field, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe’s suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use.

You can use Google Scribe on any active text field in a webpage. For example, you can now type faster in Twitter to send updates faster, fill comment form of a blog, compose email, be it GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or any other email, etc. With the handy keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures you can now fasten up text typing while also cut typing errors.

If you are using Google Chrome, then you can enable Google Scribe using the official Google Scribe (Labs) Chrome Extension. If you are using any other browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Apple Safari, then you can use the Google Scribe Bookmarklet to enable Google Scribe.

Handy Google Scribe keyboard shortcuts:

If you use a Mac, you can use the shortcuts below by replacing Ctrl with Command/Meta key.

More detailed help on using Google Scribe can be found here.

Our favorite browser, Google Chrome turned two today! Two years back when I started using Chrome, I never look back. It became my favorite browser and I have it in all the operating systems that I use, be it Windows, Linux or others. And after two years it is still going strong, more faster, and I am even typing this post using Chrome!

Google Chrome is having the fastest development cycle, and it has quickly reached version 6.0 for their stable version and version 7 for their development cycle in just two years. Google Chrome 7 (incidentally, the version I’m using) is really very exciting with new features like hardware acceleration, voice translation along with Chrome Labs.

Today, Chrome celebrated its 2nd birthday with the introduction of the stable version of Google Chrome 6. Chrome 6 stable is 3 times faster on JavaScript performance than the initial first version of Chrome launched two years back. This shows that Chrome has grown and improved leaps and bounds, both in terms of internal performance and exterior look, and thus has become the top choice of many geeks and non-geeks. Google Chrome 6.0.472.53, the stable build, has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms simultaneously.

This new stable build of Chrome comes with a host of new features that includes autofill capability and other user interface perks. Google Chrome 6 also brings the new consolidated menu, richer content settings like the JavaScript, plug-ins, notifications, and others, and the first-run search engine selection screen. There’s also a faster V8 JavaScript engine under the hood. Another notable change is absence of http:// in address bar. It is important to note that it’s only been four months since Chrome 5 went stable, so a new stable version just proves the great amount of development work happening at the backend.

Direct Download Google Chrome 6

You can directly update to Google Chrome 6 via the browser by clicking on the wrench icon and clicking on About. You can also download directly by clicking on the download button below:

[button style="download" link="http://www.google.com/chrome?brand=CHMP"]Download[/button]
[button color="#f90" border="#aaa" style="download" text="dark" class="my-button" link="http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/472.53/chrome_installer.exe"]Download Offline Installer[/button]

Normally when a user installs Google Chrome, it is installed only for the current user who installed the software. Installing this way, you will not need administrator rights to install Google Chrome. Thus, anyone, especially in corporate or offices, if you don’t have administrator rights, you can install Chrome and don’t have to forcibly use Internet Explorer. Until now, if users wanted Google Chrome to be available for all the users of a computer, they had to install Chrome using the Google Pack.

Google has recently added a more straightforward location for a system-level setup: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?system=true. The MSI installer only works in Windows, it currently installs the latest Dev Channel build and it seems to be targeted toward enterprise users. The link to the MSI installer will probably be added to Chrome’s download page in the near future.

Glenn Wilson, a Google Chrome engineer explained:

The current user-level installation experience doesn’t require elevation (installing at system-level does), and most users don’t know or care about system-level installs. That said, it would probably be a good idea to have some links on the download pages that say “click here for a system- level install or MSI“, so interested/advanced users could find it easily as part of the normal download install flow. Not sure what this will look like yet.

If you have a mini_installer.exe, you can just run ‘mini_installer.exe --system-level‘. If you have an untagged standalone installer (an exe that fails if you run it without command-line parameters), let me know and I’ll send you a commmand line for it.

Simply download the Google Chrome Standalone Enterprise Edition msi installer using the link provided above and launch it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 users may get UAC prompt. This msi installer is not having any options and will install Chrome web browser directly at C:\Program Files\Google. Thus, making Google Chrome available for all users, accessible through the Start Menu.

Update: Google Chrome for Business has a new homepage. You can download Chrome for Businesses from here.

Thanks to Google Operating System for the news. Thanks to our reader Kevin for the new working link.

A lot of my readers were asking this question to me. They wanted to know how to completely disable flash in Google Chrome after Google decided to integrate Flash natively in Chrome web browser. So, I went in the quest to find the answer. Today, I found the answer hidden inside Google Chrome’s plug-ins manager (not the extension manager).

It is a very simple trick and disables flash completely 100% in Chrome web browser.

Simply follow these simple steps below:

1. Open Google Chrome web browser and in a new tab, type about:plugins and press [Enter].

2. Now you can see Google Chrome’s Plug-ins manager.

3. Here find Shockwave Flash, Shockwave for Director, and Shockwave Flash and click on the Disable link for each of them.

   

   

4. The effects of this can be see instantly and you don’t have to restart your Chrome web browser. See below, I opened a video in YouTube and it displays the message “You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video. Download it from Adobe.“

   

Do you use any other tricks or plugins to disable flash in Google Chrome web browser? Share below about it using comments.

At the Google Chrome Help Forum, Google employee Blair has posted a list of software identified to crash Google Chrome web browser. In the list users will also find some popular software such as WinMount, NVIDIA NTune, SpeedBit Video Accelerator, etc listed along with others that causes instability in Google Chrome.

Blair suggests to temporarily disable the marked softwares and see if it resolved Chrome crashes. Blair also listed some softwares, for which you can simply disable some of its functions without disabling the software completely to solve crash issues.

Listed softwares that needs to be disabled to solve Google Chrome crash issues are:

• Venturi Firewall
• WinMount
• PPLive
• NVIDIA network access manager
• NVIDIA NTune
• IS3 Anti Spyware
• SpeedBit Video Accelerator
• Folder Guide

List of softwares which you can use by disabling some of its functions to solve crash issues are:

If you have Internet Download Manager (IDM), disable the ‘Advanced browser integration’ option within IDM (go to Options > General).

If you have NVIDIA Desktop Explorer, try removing the nvshell.dll library using the steps on this site: http://www.spywareremove.com/security/how-to-remove-dll-files/

If you have FolderSize, try the fix on this site: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2900504&group_id=127365&atid=708425

If you have NOD32 version 2.7, upgrade to the latest version of NOD32 or disable internet monitoring in NOD32 2.7.

It is also noticed by Google that certain malware also causes Google Chrome to crash. Blair suggested to find and delete the following malware:

To find and remove offending libraries, go to Start > Run, enter “cmd“, and check in %windir%\system32 for userlib.dll, tcpipdog0.dll, tcpipdog1.dll, and tcpipdog3.dll. If you find them, delete them.

You should also search for userinit32.exe, which you can remove using PrevX from this link:
http://www.prevx.com/filenames/X2120915009763329958-X1/USERINIT32.EXE.html

Tip: Download Emsisoft Anti-Malware and clean your computer off any virus and malware.