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[email protected]Issue 632 • 25 May – 7 June 2022 19How can I view all my
browser extensions?
Q
I use several web browsers, including Chrome,
Edge and Firefox, and have extensions installed
in all of them. I often read about interesting
extensions in Computeractive, only to find I’ve previously
installed, disabled and forgotten about them. Is there any
program that can tell me all the extensions currently
installed across all my browsers?
Peter HillA
Your browsers will each have an Extensions or
Add-ons Manager that lists all your installed
extensions – in Chrome, for example, click the
three-dot menu button and choose Extensions from the
‘More tools’ sub-menu. However, if you frequently switch
between different
browsers, it’s much
more useful to have a
single overview of
all your add-ons.
That’s the idea behind
BrowserAddonsView, a
simple free tool from
the prolific software
developer NirSoft.
Download the program
from http://www.snipca.com/41939 – the download link is
about two-thirds of the way down the page, below the
Feedback section – and extract it from the ZIP file. Double-
click the BrowserAddonsView EXE file (it doesn’t require
installation) and a window will open listing all your
installed extensions.
The details include the name of each add-on, the browser
it’s installed in, whether it’s Enabled or Disabled, a
description of what it does (where available), the date it
was installed and much more. You can make this
information clearer by hiding columns or moving them to
less prominent positions. Click the View menu, select
Choose Columns and untick less important options, or use
the Move Up and Move Down buttons (see screenshot) to
reorder the columns.
You can’t uninstall extensions through BrowserAddonsView,
but you can at least see which ones you’ve installed and
where and when – we’ve got almost 500 of them!OPERATING SYSTEMFILE MANAGER
Tails 5.
https://tails.boum.org
What you need:
Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or
11, macOS or Linux
Tails – which stands
for The Amnesiac
Incognito Live System
- is a privacy-focused
operating system that
you boot from a USB stick. It lets you use your computer
without leaving any trace of your activities, including the
files you open, the websites you visit and the networks you
connect to. It also protects you from malware, because no
data is written to your hard drive. Tails 5.0 is based on a new
distribution of Linux called Debian 11 (Bullseye) and includes
updated versions of its bundled software, including To r
Browser, Audacity and LibreOffice. It also adds Kleopatra
for encrypting files using PGP. A new Activities view (see
screenshot) makes it easier to access your windows and
programs by pressing the Windows key, and you can quickly
find files and folders by typing into the search box. Note that
Tails is a large (1.2GB) download and requires a USB stick of
at least 8GB.
Q-Dir 10.
http://www.snipca.com/
What you need: Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11
In our Workshop in
Issue 631 (page 38), we
explained how to add
tabs to File Explorer
by switching to an
alternative tool called
Files App (www.snipca.
com/41679). Q-Dir
(short for Quad-
Directory-Explorer) also offers this feature but goes even
further by letting you view four File Explorer-style windows
at once. You can set each one to show a different folder to
easily drag and drop files between them, and open subfolders
in tabs by right-clicking them and choosing ‘Open in new
tab’ (see screenshot). The packed interface looks confusing at
first, but you can customise the view by clicking the layout
buttons on the toolbar. Q-Dir’s latest update adds support for
dark mode in Windows 10 and 11, to protect your eyes when
browsing files and folders at night. This complements the
existing option to apply colourful themes to the program, by
clicking the Extras menu and selecting one in the ‘Colors &
Design’ sub-menu.