Chrome Will Start Blocking All Remaining NPAPI Plugins In January

Starting in January 2015, Google’s Chrome browser will block all old-school Netscape Plug-In API (NPAPI) plugins. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Google started its efforts to remove NPAPI plugins more than a year ago.

Over the last year, Google went from recommending that developers move away from this old architecture to actively blocking almost all NPAPI plugins. There was, however, always a whitelist that allowed some of the most popular NPAPI plugins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, Unity and Google’s own Google Earth plugin to continue to run in the browser. Starting in January, even that’s going away and all of these plugins will be blocked by default.

Other plugins that will be affected by this move include the Google Talk and Facebook plugins. Most of the whitelisted plugins saw their usage decline since Chrome started the deprecation program, but according to Google’s own data, Silverlight still remains popular with 11% of Chrome users launching it at least once per month. Most of that usage is probably from Netflix users, but now that Netflix is slowly moving away from Silverlight, too, the impact will likely be less than those numbers suggest.

Enterprises, which may still run some mission-critical NPAPI plugins, will be able to bypass these restrictions for the time being. Come September 2015, however, Google will completely remove support for these plugins from Chrome.

Source:Techcrunch 

How to Clean Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Websites

Have your social feeds become too messy? Is all the clutter taking up too much screen space and you can't enjoy social networks anymore? We've found some great Google Chrome extensions to help you eliminate the clutter and focus on the content you want to see.

Facebook
Facebook can be one of the most annoying websites on the Internet, if you judge by the amount of spammy notifications and clutter distracting you from the things your friends share. Although Facebook has taken several measures to eliminate spam from your News Feed, you can remove all the things you don't need using a Chrome extension called FB Purity. After installing FB Purity, login to Facebook. Then follow these steps:

1) Click the FBP button on the right side of Facebook's search bar. This will show you all the options in FB Purity.

2) You can tick mark options by clicking on the button next to them, to enable or disable features. Check the following options for a basic clean-up: Game + App Stories, People You May Know, Gifts, Trending Topics, News Ticker Bar, and Sort Feed : Most Recent. Now click Save and Close at the bottom to apply these changes.

3) There are several advanced options on the FB Purity settings page, such as hiding all sidebar links, or blocking chat, or change fonts and colours. Each is explained in a tooltip, which you can see by hovering the mouse pointer over the options.

For Firefox, FB Purity is available here.

Twitter

Twitter is a fairly clean website when compared to most social networks, but the people you follow can make your Timeline a mess. For example, whenever there is a contest on Twitter or when there is a major sporting event going on, you may not want to see all the tweets on your Timeline. To quickly clean that up, install Larry Filter. Now log in to Twitter and follow these steps:

1) Click the Twitter bird icon on the top right of Chrome browser. Here you will see a box where you can add usernames or hashtags that you want to hide from your Timeline.

2) Type the hashtag or username in the form on the right and click Add. A drop-down menu below lets you select if you want to hide those tweets entirely or reduce their opacity by 75%. Either method works well and makes your timeline look a lot cleaner.

Larry Filter is also available for Firefox.

Google+

If you use Google+, try the Google+ Optimizer extension to clear all the clutter on Google's social network. Install it and go through these steps.

1) Right-click the orange badge-like icon in the address bar and click Options.

2) Click the Filter tab and hover your mouse pointer over the thumbnails on the left to see what each one does. Here you can filter out all the "ABC +1'd this" posts, apart from YouTube comments, community invites, hashtags, people you may know, etc. Select what you need and enjoy a clean feed.

3) Our suggestion is to go to the Status-Filter header on this page, and click all three - community invites, You might know..., and birthday filter. Under the Content-Filter header, click +1 filter and YouTube filter. These options should get rid of most of the unwanted elements from your Google+ stream. Advanced options include filtering posts by hashtag or a keyword of your choice.

Unfortunately, there are no good Google+ addons for Firefox. However, you can get rid of the white space on Google+ using Whitespace Remover for Google Plus.

YouTube
The world's most popular video sharing platform may not be a full-fledged social network, but it has a huge community of commenters and comes with its share of annoyances. YouTube's several related videos on the side make it difficult to focus on the video you are watching, given that most uploaders are trying their best to grab eyeballs by uploading misleading thumbnails. To hide all the unwanted content, you can try a simple extension called Turn Off the Lights. As the name suggests, the extension makes the rest of the browser window dark, so that none of it distracts you. Here's how to use it.

1) After installing the extension, head to YouTube and play any video.

2) Now click the lamp icon in the address bar. This will dim everything on the screen except the video. Sounds simple right? There's a lot more to this extension than that.

3) Right-click the lamp icon and click Options. As you will see, there are more than enough YouTube tweaks here to help you get a clean layout. On the left side, you'll see tabs called Basics, Advanced Options, etc.

4) Under Basics, move the Opacity slider to 100. Now check the box next to "Automatically dim the background when you click the play button" and "Automatically set the YouTube player to the larger size". These tweaks should be enough for most people, but you can go through all the options to find what suits your needs.

Turn Off the Lights is also available for Firefox.

Bonus: Gmail
While Gmail isn't really a social network, we decided to include it in this article due to its popularity. Gmail is an awesome email service, but that doesn't mean it that it is perfect. Over the years, Google has added several elements that make it hard to focus on the stuff you're looking for - email.

If you'd like a cleaner Gmail layout, install Gmelius on Google Chrome. This extension allows you to hide unnecessary elements such as the top bar linking to other Google sites, the chat box, and Google+ activity, among other things.

To clean up your social feed, install Gmelius and log in to your Gmail account. Follow these steps for a cleaner look.

1) Click the "G" icon to the right of the address bar on Chrome. This will take you to Gmelius settings.

2) This page lists all the different settings such as the people widget, chat and calendars, which you can turn on and off.

3) Here are the changes we suggest. Make sure that there is a tick-mark next to these options: Footer, People Widget (only if you don't use Google Voice), Remove Google+ Activity, Colourize navigation icons, and Google icons. This will help you focus on just email. Once you're done, click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

4) If you're not sure which ones are best, Gmelius has some suggestions too. The settings page has small buttons next to each of its tweaking options, labelled Power User, Popular, Design, Zen Mode, etc. Selecting the ones marked Zen is a quick way to help focus on the best ones for mail, or you could look at the ones marked popular, to see what other people are selecting.

Gmelius is also available for Firefox, but you'll have to install the extension from their homepage as the developer will soon deprecate the version available on Mozilla's addon site.

These extensions should have helped you clean all your social feeds quickly. In case you use any other extensions, please leave a comment to let us know.

Google Debuts 64-bit Version of Chrome for Windows

Google, on Tuesday, announced that it has launched test builds of a 64-bit version of Chrome for the Windows platform, specifically for Windows 7 and 8 users.

The Internet giant has introduced 64-bit builds of Chrome for Windows on its Dev and Canary  channels.

On the Chromium blog, in an entry posted by Software Engineer Will Harris, it is mentioned that the new version once installed replaces the existing version of Chrome, whilst preserving all the bookmarks and settings, which eliminates the need to uninstall and reinstall Chrome. The post further goes on to detail the advantages that the 64-bit version will have over its predecessors. There are three advantages listed on the blog, namely speed, stability and security.

In terms of speed, Google says the 64-bit version will allow Chrome to utilise the power of the latest processor and compiler optimisations. A more modern instruction result set and a calling convention will supposedly also allow more function parameters to be passed by the registers. This according to Google results in improved speed, an average 25 percent increase, in the case of graphics and multimedia content.

Describing the security advantages of 64-bit Chrome, the blog mentions the utilisation of new Windows 8 features including High Entropy ASLR. This, Google says, will result in improved security on the 64-bit browser. It also supposedly helps better defend against JIT spraying, and improves the efficacy of existing security features like heap partitioning.

Listing the stability advantages, Google claims that it has observed a marked increase in stability in the 64-bit Chrome over the 32-bit Chrome. The crash rate is said to have reduced by half compared to the 32-bit version.

The Dev channel is updated once or twice weekly and is for developers to test new features before they arrive to stable buolda. The Canary channel is described by Google as the "most bleeding-edge official version of Chrome and somewhat of a mix between Chrome dev and the Chromium snapshot builds."

Google has not given any official dates for the launch of the new 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows on its Beta or Stable channels.