Life Changing Chrome Extension Of The Month: Hover Zoom

Seriously, it’s that good. What Hover Zoom by Romain Vallet does? It ‘simply’ loads the images behind little thumbnails and displays them in an overlay frame.

Sounds simple? I’m sure it isn’t, even more so if you look at the supported sites:

 • Amazon		• Last.fm			• 4chan
 • Baidu (百度)		• MySpace			• Reddit
 • deviantART		• Picasa Web Albums	        • Imgur
 • eBay			• Twitter			• Panoramio
 • Facebook		• Wikipedia			• Fotolog
 • Flickr		• Windows Live Photos	        • VKontakte (ВКонтакте)
 • Google Images	• Yahoo				• YouTube
 • Google+ 		• WordPress

Apart from these officially supported sites, I found Hover Zoom working well for quite a lot of other websites on which it ‘just works’.

The author has done an amazing jobs keeping the extension really simple and unobtrusive, with options for whitelisting certain sites, adjustable delay and fading effects and zoom on keyhold. It even displays captions below the zoomed image if it’s able to catch one. This is the kind of extension that’s hard to describe, but once you’ve installed it you are going to miss it on any browser that doesn’t have it.

Hover Zoom is available from the Chrome Web Store.

Ever wondered what font’s being used on a webpage?

I certainly have. And it bugged me to no ends having to look for the CSS and then maybe, just maybe find what font family’s being used. Sure, FireBug and the integrated Chrome Developer Tools eased that process somewhat, but still… well, no more. I wish I’d known earlier that the fabulous WhatFont existed. It’s a Bookmarklet/Chrome Extension/Safari Extension that basically sits somewhere until you click it. You can then hover over any text and it tells you what font’s being used to display it. If you click you get additional information about the font service used, size etc. etc. Invaluable!

Screenshot shows the Chrome Extension.

How to enable Google’s PDF Plugin in Chromium

Google’s PDF Plugin is most excellent for most needs – and for anything else you can actually download the PDF and do whatever you want to do with it (sidenote though: printing would be really nice. Pretty please, Google?). Unfortunately, it only ships with the official Chrome version and is therefore not available in the Chromium editions most distributions ship or make available.

Therefore, to get and enable the plugin on your favorite local Chromium version:

• Download a Google Chrome release that matches your processor architecture (x86/x86_64):
  # wget http://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb
# wget http://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb
• extract the .deb:
  # ar vx <previously downloaded .deb>
• extract the data payload:
  # tar --lzma -xvf data.tar.lzma
• copy the plugin to destination folder:
  (note: /usr/lib/chromium-browser is valid for my Ubuntu PPA version, might be /opt/chromium-browser or something on other distributions)
  # sudo cp opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/
• restart any open Chromium processes
• check about:plugins for the Chrome PDF Viewer, should not need any enabling
• Profit!

Chrom{e,omium} Radiance Theme

If you are like me and use the Radiance Theme on Ubuntu and the Chromium Browser, do yourself a favor and install the corresponding Chrome/Chromium Theme for it. Really blends in nicely. There is one for Ambiance, too.

If your Chromium on Ubuntu doesn’t want to play H.264…

… despite having the extra codecs from the PPA installed – a quick

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

fixes that. FFMpeg (at least for me on 10.4 Beta) isn’t installed by default and is no dependency for Chromium.