Chrome, Sweet Chrome

When I was in kindergarten, my dad brought home our first PC complete with Windows 3.1x (that's what came out before Windows 95!). In order to play one of my favorite games (Treehouse) you actually had to close Windows, get into the Dos, and type a few lines of code to pull up the game. Can you imagine doing that now??!

My first foray on the interwebs included a sketchy dial-up connection through Netscape. Looking back, I have no idea how the internet caught on. It was SO SLOW. I can clearly remember waiting an hour and a half for one picture to load. 99% of the stuff out there was text-only, so that picture seemed totally worth the wait. What I didn't realize at the time was that you actually couldn't access some of the information out there if you were using the wrong type of browser. Kinda like if Internet Explorer let you see Yahoo and Firefox let you see Google. Crazy.

Internet browsers have come a long way in the past decade(s). Thank goodness! Once I got my own computer, I started playing around with different browser options - IE, Firefox, Safari, etc. The best one I've come across by far is Google Chrome. I'm always amazed when I come across someone who's still using IE. If you're stuck in the past, still using Internet Explorer (I know you're out there!) you should really download Chrome immediately. I've never had it crash on me, it's really easy to use, very customizable, and so far it doesn't prompt you to add all of those obnoxious toolbar search engine things. Plus it has apps you can add to it!

Since Google is really open about who they allow to create apps, there are TONS of options. They have pretty much every kind of news, social, or entertainment source you'd ever want. I was browsing through the App Store the other day and ended up adding a bunch of things to test out.

Angry Birds, Robot Unicorn Attack, Robot Unicorn Attack: Heavy Metal.
Enough said.

Phone 2 Chrome, Chrome 2 Phone
I absolutely hate stumbling across a site on my phone and then having to type in the incredibly long link into my computer. Or from my computer to my phone. These two extensions (not sure why they haven't combined them into one) use your Google account to beam sites back and forth between the two. You can actually link up several computers to one phone, not sure if multiple phones can send to one computer though. Haven't tried that yet. I believe that you have to have an Andriod phone for this to work though. Not positive. You do have to be able to download the app on your phone as well, and I'm not sure if those Fruit phones have it yet.

PriceBlink
PriceBlink is an extension that runs in the background and pops up when it sees you shopping for something. Pretty much it scours the internet looking for the same product and then reports back with all of the other prices it finds. Which. Is. Awesome. It's pretty annoying to buy something from one site and then find it for ten bucks cheaper immediately afterwards. Here's a pic of PriceBlink in action:

Are You Watching This?! Sports
Are You Watching This?! Sports monitors any and all sports being played right now and lets you know if you should be watching them based on the score/how much time is left/how many other people are watching. A little icon just chills at the top of the browser and turns colors if you should click on it and see what you're missing. When you click on it, it'll open up a list of all of the games currently being played, the score, the time, and what it's rating is. This extension is also available in app form, but I haven't tried it out yet.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of other apps and extensions out there if these ones aren't your cup of tea. But I totally recommend downloading Chrome if you haven't yet (weirdo) and checking out how awesome you can make your browsing experience!