Link Safe

Install MaskMe (bit.ly/Makeme) and create an account. Register your real name and email address. Next time you go to create an online account, click the email box.You'll get the option to either fill it with your real email or a MaskMe alias.

Click the Mask My Email option and an address will be filled in for you. Click the password box. You can create your own password or MaskMe can make one. The service remembers your passwords, but you can click a box  to see what it is. Spam filters have got much better, but a lot of unwanted email still gets through. Set up MaskMe  to hide your real email address, remember your password and block unwanted messages

If you find a website with a form that MaskMe doesn't recognise, right-click on the email or password box la and choose MaskMe. Click Email to choose an alias or your real email address. Password  can create a strong password.

Click the add-on's icon to go to the homepage. Select Masked Emails for a list of the sites where you've registered with an alias.Initially, addresses are set to Forwarding. If you get spam from them, click the button to change it to Blocked.

Android app and Chrome add-on, displays notifications from your smartphone on your computer and lets you type text-message responses faster for only 50p. It’s even better than the AirDroid app  because it works over the internet, so your PC and phone don’t have to be on the same network.

Once you’ve installed the app (which costs 50p) and add-on, click the Chrome Launcher, then Chrome on your PC (you’ll need Chrome 28 or higher installed).Then open the Chrome app on your phone. You’ll need to grant a number of permissions at this point. Tap Open Accessibility Settings and enable the Chrome service. Return to the Chrome app.Tap Next twice and type the code shown in the Chrome window on your computer. Once the code has been entered the screen on the Android device will update automatically.The first time the Chrome app starts on your phone, it may suggest blocking ‘spamming’ apps. Check the apps it’s offering to block carefully. These are usually based on how many updates an app makes, so it may accidentally suggest blocking Messages or Google Play updates. Tap Cancel on this screen. Tap Installed Apps to adjust which app notifications are shown by Chrome. Chrome sends information over the internet, so it’s a good idea to encrypt the information. Tap Open Chrome Settings, then tap ‘Encrypt Data (beta)’. Enter a password this will be used to scramble your information. Click the cog icon in the Chrome window on the Desktop, type the password, and click Save. Remove this password if the text in SMS messages doesn’t look right.

Whenever a message arrives a pop-up notification will appear on your Desktop. Click Reply to type a return message on your computer. If you don’t manage to read the message before it disappears,

the Chrome icon in the Notification Area will turn blue to show there are unread messages waiting.

Right-click this icon to disable notifications for an hour or a day if you don’t want to be disturbed.

Chorme extensions bring extra features to the browser that make everyday tasks easier and let you personalise your online experience. Here are favourite Chorme add-ons

Correct spelling errors as you type

Most spellchecking add-ons underline your mistakes with a wavy red line that you need to right-click to view suggestions. Spell Bee (bit.ly/spelling), which is described as “your personal assistant for Chrome”, saves you time by correcting misspelled words automatically from its database of more than 2,700 common errors. These include the likes of ‘wierd’ ‘transfered’ and ‘definately’, as well as text speak such as ‘2morrow’ and ‘4ever’.

Spell Bee works on all website text boxes, including emails, social-media posts and online forms. You can also add your own typos and corrections to its list.

Rather than going to the Bookmarks bar every time you want to open a saved site, the Context Bookmarks extension (bit.ly/bookmarks) lets you access your bookmarks by right-clicking a page and choosing them from the side menu. You can also access all the bookmarks in a specific folder by typing F into Chrome’s address bar, pressing Space and entering the name of the folder. Press Enter and all the pages saved in

that folder will open in new tabs.

QuickDrop (bit.ly/Dropbox) is a handy add-on that gives you instant access to the files and folders in your Dropbox account while you’re browsing the web. Once you’ve given it access to your Dropbox account, just click the Q button on the toolbar to open your Dropbox in a pop-up window. Click the Actions menu next to a file to rename, delete or download it, and to get a link you can use to share the file with someone else. You can change the date and time format in the add-on’s Settings menu.

Speedtest.net is our favourite online tool for finding out how fast your broadband really is. Following the success of its apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, the site has launched a Chrome app (bit.ly/speedtest), which tests the speed of your connection every time you launch your browser or whenever the web seems to be slowing down. Just click the Speedtest.net app on your Apps page to open a special Mini version of the tool, then click Begin Test. Within a few seconds, Speedtest.net will calculate your current download and upload speeds.

When you have lots of tabs open in Chrome, it can be difficult to find a specific one, especially if you can’t read the full titles of the tabs. The extension Tabs Board (bit.ly/tabs352) solves this problem by letting you locate tabs using your voice. Simply hold  down Ctrl-Shift-B and say the name of the website, and it will appear in a panel at the bottom of the browser. If you have several pages from the same site open in separate tabs, they'll all be displayed so you can switch between them. Alternatively, if you're feeling shy, you can press Ctrl-Shift-A to bring up the panel and type the first few letters of the desired page. Tabs Board works surprisingly well, but you'll need to grant Chrome access to your microphone each time you want to use a voice command.

If you're bored with seeing the same old view every time you open a new tab, animatedTabs (bit.ly/animated) can bring the page to life. It displays a different animated GIF each time you click the ‘New tab’ button so you can watch low quality clips of cats being silly, people falling over and other hilarity, complete with a caption, before you decide which web page to open. The random nature of the GIFs keeps things interesting and fun, although you may occasionally get a GIF that's NSFW (not safe for work).

If you're worried that Google is watching everything you search for, you can switch to Motherpipe (bit.ly/motherpipe) to protect your privacy. just click the toolbar button and type a search query to view results on Motherpipe, without your details being tracked, stored or shared. Interestingly, the search engine scours Twitter as well as the wider web, which is useful when you're looking for something topical, and lets you switch between standard, image and news searches.

 Evernote has redesigned its excellent Web Clipper tool for Chrome (bit.ly/Evernote) to make saving online content quicker and easier than ever. This interface is more compact than the previous version so that it doesn't obscure the page you're viewing, yet packs in wen more useful features. These include a more prominent Save button and options to clip a whole web page, just save a simplified version (without ads and other junk) or capture a screenshot of a specific area.

The annotation tools are now tucked away until you need them, and let you scribble and doodle on what you save, as well as add keyword tags to your clippings to keep them organised. Web Clipper can set reminders on important notes so you don't forget about them, which is handy for holiday bookings, birthday gift ideas and other time-sensitive information. Hopefully, the firefox, IE, Opera and Safari versions will also be updated soon.

YouTube is keen for you to keep watching videos. To achieve this it's very aggressive in offering you links to other videos, before, during and after you've watched anything. If you're just flicking about this can be useful,but if you're showing a video to someone else or want to concentrate on the task at hand (in a tutorial, for example) then endless comments, links and recommendations can be distracting. If so, try installing DF YouTube (from bit.ly/DFyoutube), where the DF stands for ‘distraction free'. Fire up YouTube and you'll marvel at the difference, with an oasis of calm replacing the endless lines of content that Google recommends, but never matches what you want to watch.

One of the most common criticisms of Adblock Plus (adblockplus.org) is that it slows down your computer through excessive memory usage. A Chrome extension called uBlock (bit.ly/ublock) provides a more lightweight alternative by blocking ads while using less system memory than Adblock Plus. It uses many of the same filter lists to determine what content to block on web pages, including EasyList, and lets you enable and disable them through its Options panel. You can also see the number of elements blocked on a page by clicking uBlock’s toolbar button. It’s very easy to use, and can be turned on and off with a single click, although it doesn’t offer the option to allow ‘acceptable ads’ that you find in Adblock Plus. Note, too, that the more filters you select, the more memory uBlock will use, so it’s wise to deselect any that you don’t need.

Whenever you visit YouTube, the homepage recommends channels that you might like, based on videos you’ve watched previously and what’s popular on the site at the moment. If you don’t want to see these, you can click the three-dot icon in the top-right corner of each strip and choose ‘Hide these videos’, but a better solution is to block the channels permanently using Video Blocker (bit.ly/blocker). Simply right-click a video and choose ‘Block videos from this channel’ or right-click the extension’s icon in your address bar, choose Options and type the name of the channel to block. If you change your mind later, you can easily unblock channels by removing them from the list. The add-on is also available for Firefox.

If you’re tired of playing the same old songs from your music collection, you can use the brilliant Chrome extension Instant Music (instantmusicapp.com) to stream some new ones. It’s small, fast and very easy to use: just click the toolbar button, select a genre such as pop, rock or easy listening and choose how many songs to include in your playlist  from 10 to 100. You can then hear the lot from wherever you are on the web, and shuffle, skip and delete tracks as you see fit. There are even keyboard shortcuts to control playback, such as Ctrl-Shift-X to play and pause tunes. Instant Music sources the most popular charts from iTunes, Billboard and Melon, and lets you click Watch to view their videos on YouTube. It’s a marvellous, must-have extension for music fans.

The add-on Ballloon (bit.ly/baloon) yes, that’s three ‘l’s for some reason lets you save images, links and other files to Dropbox and Google Drive, without needing to download them first. When you see something of interest on a web page, simply right-click it and choose which storage service you want to save it to. Alternatively, to grab a picture, just hover your mouse over it and click the Drive or Dropbox icons that appear in the top right.

If you use Facebook on your iOS or Android device, you’ll probably be familiar with the ‘chat heads’ feature, which lets you read and reply to messages by tapping movable bubbles of your friend’s profile photos. Faces.im (bit.ly/Face) brings the same fun feature to the Desktop version of Chrome, so that when you receive a new message, a chat head appears on the side of your browser, no matter where you are on the web. Click the bubble to open a pop-up window so you can read the message and write your reply, without needing to visit Facebook, and use the Actions menu to delete conversations.

Sometimes when you visit a web page, a huge pop-up overlay opens that fills your screen and prevents you seeing the content behind. This may be an advert, a prompt to sign up or subscribe to the site, or a requirement to agree to terms and conditions.

Whatever the reason, it can be very annoying, but an extension called BehindTheOverlay (bit.ly/overlay) solves the problem by hiding overlays instantly when you click its toolbar button. This is particularly useful when you can’t find the often tiny ‘close’ option. A Firefox version is due soon.

Make web pages easier on the eye 
Give your eyes a rest by activating Hacker Vision (bit.ly/Hacker), which applies a high-contrast dark theme to every page you visit. Rather than just making the background black and the text white, the add-on uses a range of colours to highlight different elements. Hacker Vision can be toggled on and off using its toolbar button, and could even save battery life when you’re browsing on a laptop.

I don’t set Chrome to automatically restore my previous session when I open it, because it can take an age waiting for all the tabs to load and I don’t usually want to open all the web pages that I was looking at yesterday. However, I recently discovered that Chrome still lets you restore your previous session manually, which is really handy when you’ve accidentally closed your browser with lots of tabs still open.

To use this feature, click Chrome’s menu button, hover your cursor over ‘Recent tabs’ and select the option named according to the number of tabs you had open when the browser was closed, such as ‘10 tabs’. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Restore Chrome sessions manually BROWSERS Ctrl+Shift+T if you prefer. If you’ve closed more than one browser window, they can all be restored from this menu, but the keyboard shortcut will only restore the last one you closed. I find this feature gives me the best of both worlds, allowing Chrome to launch quickly but also giving me the option to restore my last session when

I need to.

To open Microsoft Office files, you’d typically need to install additional software. With this extension, clicking a 1997-2013 Office file on the web will open it directly in Chrome identical to Chrome’s PDF Viewer.

Google recently released Chrome Office Viewer (http://bit.ly/1166Z7s), which lets you view Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in Chrome, without needing any Microsoft programs. Once you’ve installed the add-on, just drag and drop a document to the browser window. You can resize the file to fit the page, zoom in and out, and save or print it.

.doc

.docx

.xls

.xlsx

.ppt

.pptx

Chrome can do a lot more than browse the web and the Chrome Web Store (bit.ly/chorme) has lots of useful apps and extensions. Half way down the left-hand menu is a tick box labelled Runs Offline. Tick it to display apps that don’t need an internet connection, which includes everything from Angry Birds to. These could be useful in parts of the country with a poor broadband signal (or no signal at all), and for laptop and Chromebook owners who travel or just like to sit in the garden on a sunny day and are just out of reach of their Wi-Fi.

I’ve recently noticed that Chrome has added a new ‘profile’ icon (with my name) at the top right of my browser window (to the left of the minimise and close buttons). It lets you switch user accounts or use Incognito (Chrome’s private browsing mode). I find this icon distracting and wanted to get rid of it. Thankfully, this is quite easy. In the Chrome browser bar, type chrome://flags, press Enter, then press Ctrl+F to bring up the search bar at the top right. Type new profile management system to see the relevant option highlighted .Click its dropdown menu then select Disabled. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page and click Relaunch Now to re-open your browser without the profile icon.

When you download files in Chrome, progress is shown in a box in the bottom-left corner of the window. Not only does this take up space, but the box vanishes moments after the download finishes typically just when you’re about to click to open the file – so you have to go to your Downloads folder to get to it. A new experimental feature in Chrome solves the problem by showing your download in a separate window, which doesn’t interfere with what you’re doing and lets you retrieve files at any time. To activate it, type chrome://flags into your address bar, look for the entry ‘Download Status in Notification Centre’ and click Enable. Relaunch Chrome and the progress box will pop up on screen the next time you download a file. Once the download is complete, click the arrow on the taskbar to open the notifications area, then click the notifications icon to open the file.

If you‘ve updated your device to the latest version of Android (5.0, called Lollipop) and open multiple tabs in Chrome. you won't be able to access tabs you opened previously. To access these tabs, you'll need to tap the square button at the bottom right of your screen (called the Overview button).

To open a new Chrome tab, tap the three dots at the top right, then ‘New tab’ and go to the website of your choice. In order to switch between open Chrome tabs you first need to tap the Overview button. You’ll now see all the apps that are open on your device as a carousel (each Chrome tab appears as a separate slide in this View). Swipe through and tap the tab you want to open.

If you’d rather see all your open tabs within the same browser. then there‘s a default setting you need to tweak. To do this, open Chrome, tap the three dots at the top right. scroll down and tap Settings. Next, tap ‘Merge tabs and apps‘ (see screenshot below left), tap the slider to turn it off. then OK.

Now open Chrome and you'll see a tab number to the right of your URL bar at the top. Tap it to see your other open tabs within the app, then tap the one you want to navigate to.