Chrome setup

In the spirit of “basic things I do to make my life easier,” here’s how I have Chrome set up:

Extensions

  • AdBlock Plus: Blocks many ads.
  • Ghostery: Lets you control what JavaScript is executed as you browse, e.g. you can turn off some DoubleClick tracking.
  • OneTab: You click the button and all your open tabs go into OneTab. (They stop taking CPU cycles/RAM.) You can then re-open them as you see fit. I open tabs constantly, and OneTab is an easy way to “save” those sets of tabs if I’m not ready to look at them.
  • 1Password (installed via the 1Password application): super good application/extension to keep track of passwords and generate passwords. Note: once the extension’s installed, ⌘-\ will fill in passwords for you.

Bookmarks

The only bookmarks I have in Chrome are on the bookmarks bar, right below the location bar. I use Pinboard for all my other bookmarks.

  • “fxns” folder:
    • pinboard bookmarklet to bookmark a page
    • “read later” bookmarklet to bookmark in pinboard with “read later”
    • “pinboard random” to read a random pinboard unread bookmark
  • “tabs” folder: each of the tabs I want open whenever I’m in Chrome. (I have one window that’s my “work” window with my email, to-do list, etc as tabs.) Then you can right-click this folder and say “open all”. For my work account:
    • Gmail
    • Google Drive
    • Toodledo
    • Google Calendar
    • Google Voice (Note: this links directly to my “alt”/personal account, so I don’t have to click to change Google accounts. Each Google product handles this differently, but for Google Voice it’s https://www.google.com/voice/b/1#inbox where the number is a 0-based count of which account you want to open.)
    • Google Intranet for my business
    • HootSuite
  • “temp” folder: folder for stuff I’m going to reference a lot, but just for a little while. For example, when I’m doing a creative commons image search for a presentation then I might bookmark that page in this folder.
  • other web sites, bookmarked straight on the bookmarks bar, with NO TEXT. If you edit a bookmark and delete its text, Chrome will still show the icon. I do this for the Django documentation, for example–I just see the icon for Django (~¼” wide) rather than the icon + description (1+” wide). This way your bookmarks bar stays less cluttered.

Settings

I personally turn off form auto-fill and saved passwords, because I use 1Password for that. (1Password can store your “identities,” credit card info, etc, so you can have 1Password fill out these forms.)

Fancy things

  • Hush: separate program that detects when you are seeing a Hulu commercial and mutes your volume until the commercial is over

Updated: