Drag & drop with gmail and chrome

Google's Gmail made another step towards the client operating system integration.

It was possible to drag&drop files from operating system to Gmail window to make an message attachment. Now it's possible to drag&drop attachments out of Gmail message to perform "save"-like feature.

It works in Google Chrome only, so enjoy your browser!

Resurrecting plugins after chrome crash

There is a odd possibility of losing installed plugins after file system crash. It happened to me today.

No plugins means popping up flash ads, no twitter client, no readability plugin, no fun.

The repair procedure is quite easy. There is a directory of so called Local Storage where chrome saves all site and plugin specific settings. At WindowsXP its in Documents and Settings/[username]/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default/Local Storage. On other systems search for Local Storage folder or for chrome-extension_*.localstorage file.
Filenames begins with chrome-extension_ and after this prefix goes the string we are looking for. It's address of the plugin on Google Extension site. At the end of filename there is _0.localstorage suffix.

To access such install site we need to recreate url:
from chrome-extension_encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic_0.localstorage
to something like this https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic

So the links for my favourite plugins RapidShare DownloadHelper, AdBlock+ Element Hiding Helper, Chromed Bird, FlashBlock and Readability Redux.

Handy text selection

I just discovered great Chrome text selecting feature.
When I double-click on text, the word is selected. It's common.
Moving the mouse while having left button pressed change the selection. It's common too.
But you can use keyboard arrow keys together with Shift key to select text more precisely than using just the mouse.
It's really handy especially when I am travelling and not using mouse but touchpad, which is not very precise device.

Chrome 2 and autoscroll

Chrome 2 is here for a while with some nice features. Autoscroll is the one that I like a lot.

People are used to middle click on the document and then navigate with single move of mouse. And it's good that this nice little feature is in Chrome.

Btw: I'm still looking forward for support of user plugins.

Add-ons and Greasemonkey-like user scripts

I really miss one thing in Chrome - add-ons or plugins. I have few of them (let's name just Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper, Flashblock and Mouse gestures) in my Firefox and it makes this browser a way better product.

You may imagine my joy when I heard that Google will adopt add-ons in Chrome:

Google's new Web browser eventually will support add-ons and user scripts à la Firefox Add-ons and Greasemonkey, Google engineer Ojan Vafai said during a panel discussion on the future of Web browsers at Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Friday.

First Update

Updating software is important. Here is a short story of updating Chrome.





...and after Chrome restart:

Broken flash repair

This time I stumble upon a flash video on YouTube. I just want to see another part of my favorite Top Gear program and it was not playing at all. Just load video in back (I can see running gauge) but no video playing.

Flash plugin was dead!

Now I have two choices - restarting the browser or restarting the flash plugin. In all other browsers I had to restart the whole thing. Users of Chrome are lucky - they should start Chrome task Manager (Shift+ESC) and just kill the misbehaving flash plugin.

Flash frame within YouTube turns black with sad face (yes, it works for tabs or plugins) and at the top of the tab there was the message that "The following plug-in has crashed: Shockwave Flash". Intentionally, at least for this time.

After reloading the tab it loads the new instance of Flash plugin and video starts.

Nice work, guys!