Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm feeling as though you and I should take a walk down browser basic boulevard and have
a chat about how our browsers work.
Browsers out of the box are just awesome tools.
I’m talking Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
They’re windows to the internet world and they give us access to so much information.
But we can extend the functionality of those browsers using things called extensions.
So I want to make sure that you understand how to manage, how to add and how to control
the extensions in your browsers.
So it’s browser basics today on DottoTech.
Regardless of which web browser you use, they all can extend their functionalities through
something called extensions.
Now I’m going to take you on a bit of a whirlwind tour today through Chrome, Safari
and Firefox and show you how we can load extensions and manage extensions in each of those browsers
because they all handle them slightly differently.
That’s why we have to go with the all three.
It would be great if I could just show you one but I can’t.
Now what is a browser extension?
Well out of the box, our web browsers allows us to access pages and to interact with web
pages and websites.
Extensions do things beyond that scope.
For example, here if we take a look at my install here of the Chrome browser, along
the top here you see a series of extensions that add functionality to my browser.
These are all tools that I decide that I want and that I use pretty much every day.
Right here we have LastPass, which allows me to manage all of my different passwords
to get into different accounts like my bank account and have secure passwords for that.
The one that I probably use the most is the Evernote Web Clipper and if you follow this
channel at all, you know that I’m a huge fan of Evernote.
What the Evernote Web Clipper does is it creates a link between Evernote and my web browser
allowing me to copy information that I find in the web browser directly to Evernote.
It’s basically a conduit between my web browser and Evernote.
So this is a prime example of what a browser extension can do for you.
I could accomplish the same thing by copying and pasting and then opening Evernote and
then going in then pasting a note in Evernote and creating a new note.
But now it’s all done for me with one click of the mouse using the browser extension.
That’s where we really benefit from using these extensions.
Now how do you access browser extensions and how do you add browser extensions to your
web browser?
Let us begin there.
Like most of the different features on the computer now, there are multiple ways to get
in to the same place.
But the easiest way probably is just going under the window menu in Chrome and choosing
Extensions.
This will launch an area of the browser that allows you to manage all of the extensions
that are installed in the browser.
Now you could install extensions but they don’t always have to be active.
This is great if you have to use some extensions just for project work that you are working
on and you want them turned on or off or like me where I’m testing out different extensions
and then preparing them for doing demonstrations.
So you can see here that I’ve got a lot of extensions installed in my browser, probably
more than I need, definitely more than I need but you can see, some of them are enabled
and some of them are not enabled.
You can delete them at any time by clicking on the trash can which will delete them.
So I got all of these different browsers.
Why do I not uninstall them?
Because occasionally I’m doing different demos and I need to jump in, people ask me
questions and they’re most of the ones that are left installed or the ones that I’ve
done demos on in the past and maybe not necessarily using all the time myself.
Having said that, how do we first of all add new extensions to our browser?
Well, you can do that in Google Chrome by going to the very bottom of the extension
page and saying Get more extensions.
When I click on Get more extensions, it launches the Chrome store which can be a little bit
confusing because not only does the Chrome Store when we do a search shows us extensions
but it also shows us apps that can run on our smartphone and other things.
Having said that, let’s say that you were deciding to install the Evernote Web Clipper
in Chrome just like I have.
You go to the store here.
You type in “Evernote” in the search and once I do that search, up comes the different
apps.
As I mentioned, it does get a little bit confusing.
There are some android apps.
But here, look for extensions we can install if I didn’t have it installed.
You could install the new extension that you need.
You just click on Add to Chrome and it does it very quickly and effortlessly.
It just basically does a quick install and then it will appear here in the menu bar of
your browser.
It’s that easy to install new extensions into your browser.
If we go back into the browser, if you want to enable or disable them, you can use the
check box from here.
Here’s an interesting one here.
This is Dashline.
This is another password manager that I’ve used.
It’s giving me a warning here saying that it was not installed form the Chrome web store.
This is because I installed it directly from the Dashline app when I installed the app.
Sometimes, apps, applications that you run on your computer will also create a web or
a browser extension if you choose to enable that as you install it.
But that could also be a warning that something might have been installed that you didn’t
want to have installed.
We’ve all had that happen by the way, if you think about what happens in the past if
you’ve downloaded a file and all of a sudden your browser acts differently, maybe it searches
at a different homepage or there’s all of a sudden little shopping tools all installed
as extensions.
That’s often the case where something has been installed and you haven’t given it
permission.
That’s one of the reasons why you need to know about the extensions to be able to go
in and discover those things that have been installed and turn them on or off.
That’s happened to us all.
Every time you try and have some fun on the internet, download something new or play with
some toy that is not necessarily business-related, you often end up with somebody modifying your
browser in some way.
But you can switch it back and you can take control by understanding the extensions.
That’s how the extensions work in Chrome.
Let’s take a look and let’s jump over into, in this case here, Safari.
This is for the Mac users.
In a moment, I’ll show you Firefox if you are a Firefox user.
Now Safari manages the extensions again slightly differently.
Here we go under the Safari menu and you can click on Safari extensions.
There are actually again two places that you need to know about within Safari to manage
your extensions.
When you click on Safari extensions, it actually launches the Apple website and allows you
to install different extensions and search for the extension from the website here.
So you can see as we scroll down, we’ll see that I have LastPass installed on my browser.
You can see that it’s installed.
Next to it is this improved Facebook and this widgets bar.
If I wanted to install any of those, I can click on Install Now.
You can read the descriptions of course of what the different extensions will do as you
go through it.
Some of them are really useful, some of it are really useless but there is just a huge
collection of them and you can search for more.
Let’s do the same thing.
Let’s search for Evernote and it’s brought up the Evernote Web Clipper.
If it wasn’t installed, I could install it again.
You do all of these from a webpage in the Apple site.
Now if you want to manage your extensions, you go to a different place.
You go again the Safari menu into Preferences and there you could manage and you can see.
I use Safari a lot less than I use Chrome so I have a lot less extensions installed
myself.
I only have LastPass and the Evernote Web Clipper but you can turn on and off the extensions
here, enable them and disable them just as we did within Chrome.
So you have the exact same control here in Safari.
Finally, let us have a look at the same thing in Firefox.
Here I am in Firefox and in Firefox they don’t call them extensions, they call them Add-ons.
We go under the Tools menu into the Add-ons and here we actually have access to not only
the add-ons but the Extensions and Appearance.
I misspoke.
They do call extensions extensions but you get to it through the Add-on menu, which is
where you’re basically adding anything into the Firefox browser.
Again, you can see we have exact same tool, the exam same potential for managing everything
and if we want to add more, we just go back to the Get add-ons and here we can search
using the same search criteria and I can see the available add-ons.
It tells me that in this case here, I can install the Evernote Web Clipper and these
other tools that are all related to Evernote in one form to another.
We have the ability to again install right from this menu here itself.
So regardless of which browser you’re working in, the extensions work pretty much the exact
same way.
They extend the functionality.
You need to know what extensions are running in your browser, which ones you use and turn
off the ones that you don’t use, even if they don’t seem to be bothering you because
they do use up system resources.
So your computer will run faster if you have less of these installed but have a look because
some of them are incredibly useful.
I hope that you found this video today to be incredibly useful as well.
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Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.