Google Chrome is one of those programs that has been around for a while, but when you first tried it, you weren’t that crazy about it. It was somewhat buggy, it didn’t have any type of customization available, and you couldn’t block ads. As much as I wanted to make the switch (being the Google nutjob that I am), I couldn’t do it without a few features that just weren’t available:

1. I needed ads blocked. Period. Even most of them would be sufficient.

2. Add-ons. I want to be able to customize it.

3. A way to integrate my Google Bookmarks so that I can use them like regular bookmarks.

Then one day a couple months ago, I heard that extensions were finally hitting the mainstream. Google Chrome Extensions were a great idea, but you needed to download Chromium, which was the “guinea pig” version of Chrome (which means it doesn’t always work properly), and you had to do a lot of nerdy command-line work to get it up and running. It wasn’t pretty. Once one-click extension support came around, it was time to dive back in.

Now, a few months later, I couldn’t be happier.

Why Switch From Firefox?

Hey, Firefox is a great product. Go ahead and download it if you’d like. It’s stable and it’s popular. But Firefox is very prone to bloatedness. After a while, it takes forever to load Firefox. Chrome just pops right up. It just feels light. Check out the screencast I took below of a comparison between a Firefox start and a Chrome start and you will see what I mean. The little box that pops up in the middle is Launchy, which is my application launcher. In layman’s terms, the box pops up and I start typing the name of the program. When the box disappears, that means I hit “enter” and the application is starting. First I try opening Firefox, then Chrome. Check it out:

If you time it, Firefox takes a full 7 seconds to load up for use, and Chrome takes about 1/2 a second – that means Chrome, in this situation, is 14 times faster loading!

Interested yet? Here are my full reasons why you should give Chrome a chance:

1. Speed. See the above video.
2. Full script support without any extra extensions. One of the best plugins for Firefox is Greasemonkey, which allows you to install “scripts” that will modify a particular website for you. For example, I have a script installed that makes my Google Calendar go full-screen without any sidebars by hitting the “F12” button. But working through Greasemonkey is a little abstract for the average user. In Chrome, you can just go to a site like UserScripts.org, find one you like and click “Install”. Chrome does the rest – and if you like wasting time on Facebook with Mafia Wars and FarmVille, they have tons of scripts to make it a more awesome experience for you (if you’re into that sort of thing).
3. No restart necessary. Want to install an extension? Go for it. It’ll just show up. You don’t have to interrupt your entire browsing session to install one script or extension. They’ll just be there for you.
4. Speaking of no restarts, the whole application won’t crash on you. Say you are in Firefox and you have a problem with a website that causes your browser to close. That sucks. Now you have to restart and possibly “restore” your session. In Chrome, only that tab closes out on you. So if you have a bunch of open tabs, they don’t depend on each other – minimizing the interruption.
5. More screen real estate – look at sites, not toolbars. I had to install plugins and customize Firefox to get as much screen as possible for browsing. Chrome’s got it all set up already. In fact, it doesn’t have a bottom toolbar, giving you even more room for surfing.
6. Turn web pages into applications. Sometimes I just want to open up straight to Gmail. I browse to my Gmail, then click the little page icon in the upper-right corner and click “Create application shortcuts…”. I can put a shortcut on my desktop, in my Quick Launch, and/or in my Start Menu. It will go straight to that site in a full window, just like an application (i.e., no address bar, etc.). I have that set up with Hootsuite as well.

Okay, okay – enough gushing. Time to get into the nuts-and-bolts: how do you set this thing up? Remember – it needs to do all the stuff that my awesome Firefox setup could do.

After installing Chrome, you need to block some ads

This is easily the most complicated part of the process, but it’s not that hard, really. Without a true contender to the ad-blocking throne, the best way to do it, in my experience, has been through a program called Privoxy. There’s a 7-step process to it that is awesomely-simplified in this post by Lifehacker and Geekzone. Just follow it, step-by-step, and you’re done. Bada bing.

Throw on your bookmarklets

Remember from my Firefox setup, I make full use of bookmarklets – little bookmarks that can do some awesome things in your Bookmarks Toolbar. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open up a Firefox window next to your Chrome window and literally drag your bookmarklets from Firefox and drop them into the Chrome toolbar. If you don’t have that, here are links to my bookmarklets and what they do. Instead of clicking on the link, just drag it up to your Bookmarks Toolbar:

• StumbleUpon Toolbar – All the fun of StumbleUpon with none of the bloated toolbar taking up space.
• GmailThis! – Like a page/article and want to quickly email it to your buddy? Click this icon and a new “Compose Email” window will pop up with the site title in the subject line and a link to the page in the body. Very handy!
• Subscribe in Google Reader – If I find a new blog, I can just click this button and it will automatically open up Google Reader and subscribe to it for me.
• The Hootlet – If you use Hootsuite to share stuff on Facebook and Twitter, clicking this will automatically open a new “hoot” with the title and shortened link to the site. GREAT for link sharing on Twitter!
• Lifehacker Random – The latest addition to my bookmarklets: Lifehacker just put out this button to go to any random article from their vast archives. What a great site.
• Readability – After setting this one up, you can just click it and it will clear your webpage of anything except the article text and pictures. Very useful with Evernote (I’ll be doing an article on that one soon).

Get some sweet extensions

Like Firefox plugins, these add-ons help you further customize your browsing experience. There are plenty out there, so feel free to browse around. Here are mine:

• GBX – Google Bookmarks For Chrome – This is a third-party extension that inserts my Google Bookmarks into the bookmarks toolbar to work like any bookmarks on a browser. Probably my favorite extension, just because I never think about it.
• Evernote Web Clipper – Like a page/article and want to save it for later? Just click this button and it will save it and set up a new note in your Evernote for you.
• Google Docs – One-click access to your most recent Google Docs, which is great if you just want to open up one quick document (or create a new one right away).

• Handy Google Shortcuts – If you like Google like I do, you use a lot of their products. This is a nice drop-down box of Google products (customizable, too) so that you can go straight to your Gmail, Reader, YouTube, or any of your favorite Google stuff.

Take it to the next level with scripts

No complicated Greasemonkey stuff. Just click “Install” on these bad boys:

• Facebook Fixer – There’s not enough room to fit all its features in here, which is why I wrote a full post on it a while back.
• Facebook Purity – Don’t care what quizzes people took? Annoyed by FarmVille announcements? God bless you. Hide them all with this script.
• Remove Facebook Ads – Privoxy doesn’t catch these. It does as promised.
• GooglePreview – Adds a little screenshot of each web site in the Google search results. Helps you figure out where you’re headed before you click on it.
• Google Images Enlarger – When doing an image search, this allows you to mouse-over the thumbnail and see a full-size picture without having to click through to the site. Very handy and a big time saver!

Your turn

Am I preaching to the choir? Do you already use Chrome? What are your favorite extensions/scripts? Why should we encourage more Chrome usage? If you’re a diehard Firefox user and you’re not convinced, tell us why. If you’re an Internet Explorer advocate, seek help immediately – we cannot help you here.

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Okay, so you read 6 Ways The Average Person Can Use Twitter Without Feeling Like A Loser. You’re convinced you want to try this thing out and see where it takes you. But when you hop onto the Twitter homepage and sign up, you still don’t quite “get it”. And that’s okay, because to be honest, the native Twitter interface is kinda clumsy and is missing several key features. You want Twitter to be easy on the eyes, contain what you want it to contain, and be insanely easy to use. Enter HootSuite.

HootSuite is billed as the “professional Twitter client”, but it’s much more than that. I was looking for a place to handle multiple Twitter accounts (for business purposes). I found every Twitter-related need fulfilled under one roof. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Need #1: Sending out a new tweet.

Easy as pie. The Hootsuite box at the top lets you type up a new tweet with a running counter of what you’ve got left (for those unfamiliar, Twitter only lets you use 140 characters in a tweet). I can click on the profile picture of whichever Twitter profile I want this to post to (it will put a little green checkmark on top of the selected picture). If I want to, I can post to all of my Twitter accounts, or just a select few. It also has a wonderful little box for you to enter in a URL to shrink using Ow.ly, HootSuite’s URL shortener.

Need #2: Scheduling future tweets.

When you click on the “Send Later” link, the box opens up to reveal a little scheduler, allowing you to post tweets for the future. This is a great piece of integration. Just like URL shortening, tweet scheduling was something that previously needed a separate service. Here it is, just a click away. For example, I will be scheduling a tweet to announce this post that will hit Twitter tomorrow morning. I’ll probably still be in bed.

Need #3: A clean, sharper, customizable interface.

On Twitter’s official site, looking at all these different things shown above had to be done on separate pages. Here we can see them all at a glance: your home feed (where your tweets are integrated with the tweeters you are following), your mentions (when somebody makes a public reference to you or replies to something you tweeted), your direct messages (private tweets sent directly to you), and the tweets that you’ve sent. These are all columns I added. They can be moved, rearranged, or deleted. Other column options include search terms (great for monitoring a topic of discussion), among others.

At the top of the page, there is also the ability to add tabs – in my case, one for each account that I am managing – and a “Featured” tab, which has two columns: one with Hootsuite’s official Twitter stream, and one of their favorite tweeters. This “at a glance” feature makes it easy to navigate your Twitter account.

Need #4: Twitter Statistics.

Now here’s where things get good: sharing a link on Twitter is great, but it’s nice to know if people are clicking on your links at all. Previously, this meant using a specific URL shortener – bit.ly is the most popular one – and checking back with it to see how it is performing. HootSuite’s URL shortener tracks the link for you, and provides the statistics in real-time with just a click. In this case, it turns out 4 people were interested in watching the 12-minute video of a guy beating Super Mario World on YouTube (hey, give me a break, it’s late at night). When posting links to The Practical Nerd, this can come in handy, so that I can determine how my links are performing.

Need #5: Easy sharing.

If I had a nickel for every service I’ve used to automatically tweet a link… well, I’d have about 15-20 cents. But that’s not the point. When I want to share a link on Twitter, I like to use a solid bookmarklet for one-click access. My most recent move was using TBUZZ, which automatically inserted a shortened URL for me to share with the world. The only snag was that I constantly had to open a new pop-up to log into Twitter any time I started a new Firefox session.

But HootSuite again solves the problem with the Hootlet, a cute name for a sharp little bookmarklet. When I’m on a webpage that I want to share with the world, I click the Hootlet in my bookmarklets toolbar, and up pops a little box for me to fill in:

As you can see, the Hootlet has already shortened the URL for me (using their shortener, meaning I can track the link’s performance), adds the title of the page, and has all the other features of a HootSuite tweet: selecting profiles, scheduling for later, etc. It’s also lightning-quick.

Conclusion: It’s a winner!

HootSuite has all the features that I could possibly think of, under one roof. This is a completely integrated solution for any Twitter user, professional or recreational. It makes tweeting as easy as a few clicks. Want to make it your desktop solution, as opposed to a web-based program? I use Google Chrome’s great feature that turns any web page into its own desktop application. Then I use TrayIt!, a simple little program that allows me to minimize HootSuite to my system tray:

Now Hootsuite runs in the background (using Google Chrome’s extremely lightweight browser), and if I ever want to bring it up, I just click on that little owl there.

Do you have your own favorite Twitter client? Or have you tried HootSuite? Share with all of us in the comments!

Get great, practical advice sent straight to your inbox every week! For more information on The Practical Nerd Rules for Life, click here. Plus, learn how you can get a copy of my FREE ebook!

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