The latest experimental utility from Google Research's kitty is Google Tone. The Chrome extension enables users to broadcast and share URLs over audio signals. Google Tone uses your computer's microphone and speakers to exchange URLs with nearby computers connected to the Internet. Any computer, phone or Hangout conversation within earshot that also has the Google Tone extension installed and turned ON can receive a Google Tone notification making sharing url's effortless.

How Google Tone Works?

Tone works on a mechanism that is very much similar to human voice. This Google extension is very aptly named Tone as it has many attributes matching the human voice. For instance, it cannot pass through walls like radio frequencies or require an address or pairing to reach to the receiver. The click of a button produces a chirruping sound from your computer speakers, and this is what sends the URL to other devices that are in the sound hearing range. The chirruping sound is both a dual tone audio (DTMF) and ultra-sonic signal. This has been specially engineered to work reliably even at low volumes in short distances for many different types of audio environment.

United Kingdom internet service providers recently started enforcing censorship on adult websites in the country, and within days a simple to use install and forget solution allows users to bypass this censorship for FREE. The smart Google Chrome extension automatically uses a proxy service to reroute the traffic when the asked for website returns an error message from ISP saying the website is blocked in UK. This approach is simple and smart as it does not require the extension to maintain or check a list of blocked websites, the proxy automatically kicks in when an blocked message is encountered.

After taking the crown for being the "fastest web-browser" in the latest 2013 Tom's Hardware benchmarks, the free and open-source web-browser Firefox grabbed another feather for it's cap by being the most stable of the lot. Sauce Labs an automated selenium unit testing service provider, crunched their data of more then 55+ million test runs and plotted the web-browser crash rate letting users a glimpse into the most stable and most crash-prone web-browser as shown below.

Firefox 22 has taken the crown of being the world's fastest web-browser from Google Chrome in the latest authoritative benchmarks carried out by TomsHardware. The comprehensive web-browser benchmark uses geometric mean of various performance and non-performance metrics to score the final result.

No matter how fast and efficient your web-browser is, it can start to crawl if multiple tabs are opened. We recently reviewed The Great Suspender - a free extension for Google Chrome browser allowing users to suspend tabs saving computing resources when not in use. Well, we now have an even better option.

OneTab - the free, web-browser extension for Google Chrome allows users to save upto 95% of computer memory by converting opened tabs into a single tab, listing all individual tabs. Unlike The Great Suspender this solution not only offers a much efficient system resources saving, but also provides additional screen real state in the tab-bar.

OneTab also allows you to easily import and export tabs as a list of URLs. The option to make a web page allows sharing of tab-list with other users, computers, and devices like smartphones and tablets.

The extension also offers full drag-n-drop functionality to organize your tab list. You can also hold down the Ctrl or Cmd key while restoring tabs, and they will remain in your OneTab list (meaning you can use OneTab as a way of quickly launching a set of commonly used tabs).

High memory usage is something most modern tabbed browser are plagued with, we have shared the excellent FireMin add-on for Firefox to tame the situation, and here is an equivalent for Google Chrome.

Working on the same concept as BarTab for Firefox; The Great Suspender for Google Chrome makes unused tabs inactive saving computing resources. The addon dramatically reduced the memory usage to 1.5x. Tab suspension not only saves memory, but also aids in a snappier browsing experience as inactive tabs do not consume other computing resources.

After my recent update to Google Chrome Version 23.0.1271.64 Adobe Flash powered videos stopped outputting sound. This is a wide spread Google Chrome specific bug and until Google fixes this here is an workaround to get the audio back.

The topmost reasons for a web-browser to crash is due to some misbehaving plugin, and Adobe Flash player issues have been one of the top reason for Google Chrome crashes. The issue of Flash plugin related crashes and Google Chrome are far more common because of the fact that "Google Chrome" comes with a pre-bundled version and users often install another one on top of it causing conflicts. Here is a simple to follow guide to discover and disable extra Flash binaries for an optimum, conflict and crash free web-surfing experience.

Synchronized web-browsing across devices is a common feature amongst modern web-browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, the ability to have in-sync web-browsing history and other settings is definitely a must have feature considering we have many computing devices including desktop, laptop, mobiles and tablets nowadays.

However very useful, the built-in feature only allows users to sync between same web-browser, and if you are looking to get your bookmarks synced across multiple browsers and devices free utility and cloud service FavKeeper is the solution. FavKeeper allows users to not only have cross-browser bookmark synching but also unlimited free cloud backup.

Yesterday, we shared the news of snappier Google Chrome being available on Apple iOS platform. However, Apple iOS does not let users select there default web-browser of choice and would only launch mobile safari for links from apps. Thanks to the Cydia Tweak "BrowserChooser", a user can now select any web-browser as default including "Chrome for iOS".