Kiran Upadhyay

While Google Chrome has seen plenty of uptake from enthusiasts, developers, and end users at home, enterprise environments have always been a bit tougher to penetrate. Internet Explorer is still king of the hill when it comes to enterprise browsing -- and even Firefox has only recently begun to make serious inroads. One thing which might help is the addition of policy support to Chrome. With administrators able to control things like access to Wrench > Options, extension installs, and content settings, they might just be a little more willing to deploy Chrome on their corporate machines -- where manageability is a primary concern. There's still the tech support hurdle to overcome: many large businesses outsource their IT help desks and Chrome support skills could be in short supply. It's still a very young browser, after all. Chrome Case Rear Only for Google Nexus ONE Google also recently introduced an .MSI package for Chrome , and that too could help furt...

With Chrome's Web app store about to launch and Chrome extensions skyrocketing in popularity, a little extra security makes sense. Right now, there's nothing keeping extension developers from introducing malware or using extensions to take over systems. Google is addressing this problem by adding a sign-up fee for developers and running domain verification for Chrome extensions . The fee is a one-time payment of $5, which isn't enough to discourage serious developers, but it's too much to throw away on a dummy account (or two, or 50). The same fee covers you for both the extension gallery and the upcoming app gallery. Domain verification is just what it sounds like: it allows devs to associate the extensions they create with their domain names. So, if you trust Google.com, you should be able to trust a Google.com extension. It's not hardcore security or anything, but it's much better than what's in place now, and it's definitely going to ...

FreeApps is a software catalog with a twist. It has a ton of quality, freeware/open source offerings that are sorted by category. You browse the catalog, and then you tick the box next to every application that you'd like to install. You then hit Get Installer and download a small file (about 0.5MB). Run the file, and it downloads all of the applications that you've marked and sets them all up, silently. It's a pretty magical experience; just hit "install" and watch the tool save you hours of browsing and installation. I tried it, and it was a really great experience. If any of this sounds familiar, it's because this is exactly what Ninite has been offering for a while. FreeApps' catalog seems to offer a wider selection, though. They have Miranda IM, for example, which is a must-have for me (but they don't offer Python, which Ninite does). Bottom line: Personally, I much prefer FreeApps to Ninite because it offers the tools that I us...

One of the biggest problems with being addicted to the latest technology is that I’m constantly downloading new files – new installs for the latest apps, new add-ons for my browser or new themes for my blog. Then there are the thousands of images piled up from years of being a blogger. After a while, I can’t remember whether or not I’ve already downloaded something. I must have three Wordpress installs buried away in my hard drive. You can find files and directories that you think may be the same, but how do you know that they’re truly duplicates? If you’re anything like me, rather than risk losing something important, you file away everything. Maybe you zip them all up and archive them. Maybe you back up everything to a big huge external hard drive for safekeeping. Ideally, it would be a lot better if you could chop down the number of files you are trying to manage by identifying true duplicates so that you can delete them. We’ve covered a few tools at MUO for dealing...

While the bulk of the buzz about HTML5 still seems to be focused on the video tag, there are plenty of other awesome developments cropping up. Things like drag-and-drop attachments in GMail and all those crazy Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive samples. Then there's the work of developer Joe Huckaby . Joe has taken images created by graphic artist Mark Ferrari to produce some incredibly cool, animated retro gaming images using HTML 5's canvas element to reproduce an effect called color cycling . While the demos themselves are impressive, equally as impressive is the fact that they work extremely well on darn near any HTML5-compatible browser -- including mobile Safari. Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: Next Generation Web Standards You can view Joe's demos on this page -- my favorite is the one above, Water City Gates.

Google has had a "dictionary lookup" feature for a while now -- all you had to do was slap define: before your search term. But they've now made it better, and mostly, made it easier for people to find it: Just search for a "difficult" word, and a definition would pop up as the first result, with quick links to some dictionaries. What's interesting is that you don't get an instant definition for every word you search for as a single word: it's just the "big words". I would love to see the algorithm they use for deciding when to pop up a definition and when to stay mum.   Google Nexus One Unlocked Phone

Google Operating System reports that Google is testing a feature for signing in using multiple accounts. While the post itself has a screenshot (which you can see above), it does not include any instructions on how to enable this functionality. This is obviously a limited or closed-beta test; the question is just how limited it is. This functionality is not just "useful" - it is often vital. I have one account tied into an AdWords account, another account tied into Analytics, and yet a third Apps account. Merging them is impossible, especially as long as Google Apps doesn't support Reader. Having a way to sign into all three at the same time from the same browser would certainly make things less irritating.