Secret settings and the best extensions
Issue 633 • 8 – 21 June 2022 43BEST EXTENSION FOR... Subscribing to RSS feeds
Feeder
Chrome, Edge and
Firefox
https://feeder.co
After scrapping its popular
Google Reader tool in
2013, Google may soon
be adding an RSS reader
to the desktop version
of Chrome, following the
Android app getting one last
October. In the meantime, you can use
Feeder to subscribe to feeds from your
favourite websites and keep up to date
with their latest content. The extension
is easy to use: simply click its toolbar
button to search for a website or feedURL, or browse categories such as News,
Tech and Food, and click the Follow button
(see screenshot ) to subscribe to a feed. You
can choose how often to check for updates
and organise your feeds into folders. Feeder
is free to use, though some features arerestricted to its paid-for (and
ad-free) Pro version, and you
don’t even need to register for
an account – doing so lets you
sync your feeds across devices.If you don’t like that, try...
RSS Reader Extension
(by Inoreader)
Chromium http://www.snipca.
com/41967
Firefox http://www.snipca.com/41968
The free version of this tool lets you
subscribe to 150 RSS feeds, as well as
podcasts, social-media pages and email
newsletters. It’s simple to use but can be
slow at delivering updated content.pointing and clicking with your mouse.
Chrome 102, released 24 May, adds two
shortcuts that let you rearrange your
browser tabs, so the most important ones
appear on the left or right – depending
on your preference. Rather than drag tabs
into different positions using your cursor,
you can now press Ctrl+Shift+Page Up to
move the active tab to the left, or
Ctrl+Shift+Page Down to move it right
(see screenshot above).
The new keyboard shortcuts
complement existing options in Chrome,
such as pressing Ctrl+Tab to cycle
through your tabs from left to right, or
Ctrl+1 to jump to the first tab, Ctrl+2 to
jump the second and so on. You can also
use the shortcuts to rearrange tabs in
Firefox, and they’re reportedly coming to
Edge in version 103.
CHROMIUM
View works of art on
your New Tab page
Bring a bit of
culture to
your New Tab page by installing a new
extension called ‘New Tab with MoMA’
(www.snipca.com/41955). This displays a
different work of art from the Museum of
Modern Art in New York every time you
open a new tab, which you can click to
learn more about the subject and artist.
The add-on was created using Google’s
Tab Maker tool, which we wrote about in
Issue 623 (page 74) and is similar to
Google’s own Arts & Culture extension
(www.snipca.com/41957), which hasn’t
been updated for two years. So far, it’s
shown us such famous works as Salvador
Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (see
screenshot above), Vincent Van Gogh’s
The Starry Night and Jackson Pollock’s
One: Number 31, 1950.EDGE
Install any website as a PWA
Towards the end of last year, there
was lots of excitement about
progressive web apps (P WA s). We even
devoted a feature to the subject in Issue
619 (page 60). Since then, things have
gone quieter on the PWA front, but the
latest version of Edge (102) should rectifythis. The browser has a new Apps
hub, which you can access by
clicking its three-dot menu button
and selecting Apps, then ‘Manage
apps’. This lets you view and open
all the PWAs you’ve installed (see
screenshot below), and pin them
to the Windows taskbar and Start
menu.
To install a website as a PWA, click
the ‘App available’ button in Edge’s
address bar – this looks like a square
of three blocks and a plus sign –
and click Install. Compatible sites
include Twitter, Argos, YouTube, Google
Photos and Outlook, but Edge now goes
further than Chrome by letting you install
any website as a PWA. Click its menu
button, choose ‘Install this site as an app’
in the Apps submenu and click Install
to add the PWA to your Apps hub.
You can add the Apps hub to Edge’s
Favourites bar for easy access to your
PWAs, and sync your installed apps
across all the PCs on which you’re signed
into your Microsoft account.