In Depth: Highs and lows of a decade in web design
As the clocks rang in the year 2000, things were looking good. The dotcom boom was in full swing and web designers were the new rock stars.
But then, barely before the champagne had time to go flat, things took a nasty turn.
The boom turned into bust as investment disappeared and tech firms went to the wall. Boo.com, launched in autumn of the previous year, was one victim, going bankrupt in May 2000 after spending its way through more than £80million.
Over the following two years, around $5trillion was wiped off the market value of tech companies. Pets.com folded in November 2000. eToys, with an IPO share price of $80, was to go bust in March 2001, and internet currency site Beenz.com went under in the same year.
Paul Wyatt, designer and writer, describes the start of the decade as one "where everyone became a web designer and the world and his wife had a good idea to make a million on the web". But it wasn't to last.
Paul Boag, creative director at Headscape, remembers the time well: "I first started in the web back in 1994," he says.
"By the turn of the century I was working at a dotcom company at the height of the boom. I remember being told that I would soon be a millionaire. Even at the time this struck me as insane. Like so many dotcoms, the company I worked for was built on hype and had no real business case. It was obvious to me that in reality the company was worthless."
Born again
But out of these ashes would come a reborn, more efficient industry. "The dotcom bust left a lot of talented people out of work, and in this downtime they started to experiment and innovate," says Boag. "We soon saw dramatic shifts in how the web is built, including the birth of the web standards movement and the reinvention of JavaScript.
WEB STANDARDS: The Web Standards Project has fought for the guidelines that make the web so accessible today
"What we're left with is a much more stable platform. It's easier and cheaper than ever to build great web apps without the need for external investment. What would have cost hundreds of thousands to develop back in 2000 is now available free through third-party APIs and libraries."
"The web has truly matured over the past decade," agrees Usman Sheikh, managing director of Contrive Digital. "We've seen businesses starting to understand and harness the power of the internet to support their operational and commercial objectives.
"Ecommerce is no longer a luxury only the larger retailers can afford. With great open source and feature-rich platforms arriving in the market, we've seen smaller retailers give the big boys a run for their money."
Dynamic sites
"I think the most significant change in web design this decade has been the evolution to building dynamic sites," says Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks. "A friend of mine is an IT guy/web admin at a university, and he has students coming to him all the time asking for help building sites for a project. He just tells them, 'Go to WordPress.com and you'll have a site up in no time'.
WORDPRESS: WordPress has been criticised for stunting creativity by encouraging people to follow similar templates
"That answer in the early 2000s would have been 'I hope you're up for learning some HTML. Now, open Microsoft FrontPage...' The process was confusing and the student would have probably given up. Today it's almost a no-brainer."
But there is a downside to this, as Craig Grannell, a regular contributor to .net magazine and TechRadar, points out: "Because of the relative simplicity of the likes of WordPress, there's still the assumption that web design is simple and therefore designers should be charging about a fiver for an all-singing, all-dancing website."
Shane Mielke, creative director at 2Advanced Studios agrees: "Flash templates, while a useful and cost-effective solution, have degraded the credibility of those of us who design and develop custom solutions for clients. I think the adoption of WordPress and templated portfolio communities has also marked a low point as there seem to be fewer unique personal sites being released with that wow factor that was present earlier in the decade."
AJAX: Ajax has been instrumental in making web apps useful and accessible to all
Flash had a bit of an image problem at the start of the decade, being viewed as inaccessible and a waste of bandwidth. "There was a tendency for designers to get carried away and create experiences that alienated those without the faster connections," remembers Rob Corradi, creative director at NeonState.
"Flash is still overused and poorly used, although not as much as it was in the mid-2000s, when lots of idiots suggested that Flash should be 'it' for web design," adds Grannell. "Flash has always been great for certain things, but I was relieved when JavaScript libraries started taking over from Flash when it came to UI elements.
"Bandwidth hogging and waste remains a huge issue, though. Many designers are fat and lazy, pumping out bandwidth-intensive output that works fine on their set-ups, but that could be faster and sleeker with relatively little effort."
"These days there can still be a lot of waiting around watching preloaders spinning – designers' work often seems to swell to fill the width of whatever pipes it travels along," says Corradi. "However, at least Flash is now mostly used where Flash is best, and has become the platform for online video and unique interactive experiences."
FLEX: Flash has gone from strength to strength over the past decade, bolstered by a number of technological developments such as Flex
"Flash continues to go from strength to strength," agrees Mike Jones, founder of Pixadecimal. "With the introduction of the Flex framework to assist rapid app development, the ability to deploy Flash content to the desktop through AIR and support for devices, Flash is the media of choice when it comes to offering rich immersive experiences and application-orientated solutions."
"In the last decade, the single most important thing that happened with regards to web design was when Flash video was incorporated in the Flash authoring tool in Flash MX 2002 and Flash Player 6," says Rob Ford, founder and principal of the Favourite Website Awards.
"This finally enabled creatives to do what they had been fighting with for years, easily adding video to their projects rather than trying to embed video players. Without this development, YouTube would not be what it is today and the web would be a very different place."
"Flash has really withstood the test of time because of the diversity in how it's used: microsites, games, banner ads, applications, video playback," says Mielke. "Every year it improves, adapts and morphs its uses on the internet. I believe it's also the main reason why front-end developers have pushed harder to develop other techniques like Ajax, which gives us even more creative options."
Standard compliance
Is there an automated app that will make web designers' lives easy? Not any time soon, says Ryan Carson of Carsonified. "Almost all truly great web designers are still hand-coding. No one has been able to create a piece of software that solves this problem: how can a WYSIWYG editor truly produce standards-compliant, semantic and accessible markup?"
Jakob Nielsen is confident of improvements in accessible sites: "If improvements continue at the current rate, we'll achieve maybe 80 per cent success rates by 2020. Getting rid of the 20 per cent of failures will require substantial usability advances, which will probably take more than 10 years. But improving the web's usability quality to the 80 per cent level can be done without breaking a sweat: sites just have to follow the basic usability guidelines that were documented at the beginning of the current decade."
ANDROID: Google's Android platform has provided an exciting challenge for a new generation of web developers
Following advice that's already 10 years old? Ought to be a piece of cake. "The next decade will also finally see the mobile web turn mainstream," Nielsen continues.
"Right now, mobile sites are still beneath contempt. A recent study by Nielsen Norman Group found that users only succeeded 38 per cent of the time when trying to access sites on mobile phones. In other words, the current mobile success rate is even worse than it was for desktop use in 2000.
"When we asked British users to find out 'what's on BBC1 tonight at 8pm' using their mobile phones, they took 199 seconds to find the answer. Much worse than our study of WAP users in 2000, when the same task only required 159 seconds. We have gone backwards in mobile usability!
"What we need is for companies to start designing dedicated mobile sites that are optimised for these more constrained devices. The old web ideal of 'design once, view anywhere' has failed and should be discarded."
User interaction
"The biggest change is likely to be in the way people interact with content," adds Craig Grannell. "In whatever a 'typical' browser evolves into, a lack of precision will lead to different interface design, with accessibility at the forefront. We're already seeing this in the shift from desktop machines to mobile, where a prodding finger is way less accurate than a mouse pointer, but also in the way you directly interact with content rather than doing so in an abstract way via a pointing device."
Grannell also warns against the design-once mentality: "Information will increasingly be accessed across hugely varying devices. While I don't think we'll get back to the bad old days of designing for every device, mobile will be increasingly important, and even when devices evolve in terms of underlying power, people will still want fast, efficient web experiences on the go, rather than sluggish, time-wasting experiences."
Rob Corradi agrees: "As we're about to enter a new decade in which new platforms emerge almost yearly, designing and building to standards and thinking multi-platform is more important than ever. With netbooks, smartphones, consoles and more, all with different processing power, different screen sizes and input methods accessing what we make, one size no longer fits all."
"Ten years is a lifetime in terms of the web and technology," adds Shane Mielke. "I think you'll see web-enabled phones, watches and PDAs become items that potentially control every electronic item we own. I think we'll see 'web design' as it's currently defined start moving away from just websites viewed on computers and grow to encompass other media. It really is exciting because it means a constant evolution for everyone and the opportunities to work on projects for TV, computer, cellphone, and so on, where currently we're limited to our own little niche of the internet."
"Mobile, mobile, mobile," says Margaret Manning, CEO at Reading Room. "While I think there may be some rough times ahead, it's undeniable that mobile is where we're all going. I think there are some really interesting design and usability challenges coming up – we've all got used to the luxury of working in lots of space on large screens. Mobile shakes things up a bit – in the way we design and in what we give to the end user."
"Everyone is going to say mobile, of course," says Brendan Dawes. "For me it's not really about that, but more about context. I want the thing I use to interact with the web to know what I'm doing, where I am and to simply work like magic. Yeah. Magic. Let's have more of that."
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Review: Panasonic TX-P37X20
The TX-P37X20 is at the bottom of Panasonic's new plasma TV pile. As such, it's rather low on features and cutting-edge technology. But we're confident it will find an audience.
Fashionistas won't like it much, mind you, for the standard black finish, unimaginative sculpting and chunky size is bland in the extreme. Its connectivity is mostly entirely standard, too, with highlights of three HDMIs and an SD/SDXC card slot capable of handling AVCHD video files or JPEG photographs. One HDMI, however, meets the new v1.4 specification and supports Audio Return Channel functions.
While hardly the most feature-laden TV in town, it's not entirely without its charms, such as 100Hz processing, a huge claimed contrast ratio (for its price) of 2,000,000:1, a new Vivid Colour option and something called C.A.T.S.
Despite the intriguingly feline moniker, the latter feature is merely another of those tools that are becoming pretty much universal, and enable the TV to adjust its pictures automatically in response to ambient light levels.
The biggest disappointments about the P37X20's specifications are its lack of a Freeview HD tuner and its merely HD Ready resolution. Though, both of these absentees are entirely predictable at this price.
Performance
The P37X20's pictures are a small step up from last year's X10 range rather than a real leap forward.
The biggest improvement comes from the new model's black level response, which is notably richer and deeper than the X10's grey effort. What's more, the enhanced darkness hasn't come at the expense of shadow detail.
The P37X20 also looks sharper with high-definition material than last year's model – sharper, in fact, than its 1,024 x 720-pixel resolution would lead you to expect.
The screen also enjoys the response time advantage of gas technology, delivering motion of all sorts and speeds without the blurring so common to LCD.
The set's viewing angle, too, is vastly superior to the angles supported by most liquid crystal sets.
Finally, colours suffer less tonal oddities than the X10 series did. However, the hues certainly aren't perfect; some reds and skin tones are orange, while some greens still look out of kilter. These problems are particularly apparent with low quality SD broadcasts.
Now we're on a negative path, black levels, while good, aren't as imperious as those of more expensive Panasonic sets; pictures aren't as bright or dynamic as those of your average LCD; the screen tends to reflect light, and while motion is free of blur, even the 100Hz engine can't stop camera pans juddering a bit.
Given the right HD material, though, it's worth an audition.
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Review: Creative World of Warcraft Wireless headset
This isn't simply a headset, it's a World of Warcraft headset. When you wear it, your ears glow with pride as colour-shifting, pulsating LEDs illuminate your choice of logo. Donning it is like putting on that new helm straight from the Lich King's corpse and… We'll stop there.
Your tolerance for this headset's gimmicks will be entirely down to your love of the game. Either you'll be excited by the idea that you can buy replacement logos for the earpieces, or annoyed that you're expected to buy new ones, and that's your call.
What we can say is that technically, these are good headphones. The build quality isn't the best, feeling distinctly plasticky, but they're extremely solid, and sound great.
The microphone is locked in position and a little sensitive, and could do with a muffler to stop it picking up the air rushing past it, but there'll be no problem hearing or communicating with your guild, either here or in other games.
The big gimmick feature is that you can change your voice. It's standard pitch-shifting stuff, with names like 'Blood Elf Female' or 'Malganis' (oddly, there's no auto-echoing Death Knight) that's fun for a while, but not very convincing.
Luckily, more subtle tweaks are also available, with the interface making it easy to tune up the EQ and THX settings to your liking, as well as saving presets and controlling the system with keystrokes.
It may be expensive, but this is a sound headset indeed.
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Review: Panasonic DMR-EX83
The Panasonic DMR-EX83 the ideal way of switching over to digital, because not only does it come equipped with a Freeview tuner, but it also packs a sizeable 250GB hard disk and a burner for dumping recordings onto a DVD.
It replaces last year's superb DMR-EX79 and we're hoping the newcomer can provide a similarly impressive performance.
Features
That hard disk gives you 441hrs of recording time in the lowest quality EP mode, although in XP that reduces to 55hrs. SP and LP offer 110 and 221hrs respectively, while Flexible Recording optimally fits a recording into a given space.
With a hard disk on board, DVD-RAM's versatile array of editing tricks is rendered redundant but write-once recording is always useful for making archive copies. The hard disk doesn't only store Freeview recordings, it also acts as a library for music (MP3, WMA) and JPEG photos, with a clear onscreen menu system that makes it easy to organise your content. Files can be transferred from USB stick or disc, and additionally you can play DivX from USB, DVD or CD.
The EX83 also features the CD ripping feature, which enables you to upload music without a PC. This recorder is strictly standard definition and will never be able to receive DVB-T2 broadcasts. So if you've got your eye on free terrestrial HD then you're advised to wait until later in the year when Freeview HD recorders become more widely available.
A more considerable problem is the inclusion of only a single Freeview tuner built-in, which prevents you from changing channel during a recording. That said, you won't find twin tuners on any other Freeview DVD/HDD combi either, so the DMR-EX83 isn't exceptional in this regard.
Connections are plentiful and include a pair of Scarts, one of which enables you to record material from external sources in crisp RGB quality.
Ease of use
As ever, there's a stupendous amount of recording and editing features on board, and they're easy to use, largely due to Panasonic's simple, cartoon-like onscreen layout and the intuitive remote. Even potentially tricky tasks such as editing out ads using Partial Delete are child's play. Select start and stop points using the moving thumbnail, hit delete and the job's done.
Auto Chapter Creation makes it even easier to avoid the adverts. The deck places a marker whenever it detects a long gap in the audio, which means you simply press the Chapter Skip key to move onto the next section. It efficiently detected all of our recorded ad breaks.
The straightforward layout extends to the Direct Navigator menu, which displays recordings with a moving thumbnail and the full programme name. Hitting the Options key brings up all of the possible editing and playback functions. You can add whole titles or individual chapters to a playlist and watch them in your own preferred order.
The Setup screen is also well laid out, but it's tucked away in an superfluous submenu. But Panasonic's biggest onscreen mistake is the cluttered 8-day Guide Plus+ EPG, which is hindered by the presence of a grey box that takes up about a third of the screen and squeezes up the programme grid.
It's also a shame that the onscreen digital TV banner is limited to Now and Next info and won't let you browse the schedules. And setting series link is quite long-winded, too, as the deck takes you through two confirmation screens before it's finished.
Picture
The DMR-EX83 upscales Freeview pictures to 1080p and the results are magnificent. There's none of the jagged edges or hazy pixel noise we've encountered on some Freeview receivers, while excellent colour and detail reproduction make good quality broadcasts, such as BBC One's Holby City, look terrific.
The deck also delivers faultless recording quality in XP mode. Thanks to its high bitrate, this mode can exactly replicate the live Freeview broadcast quality, which means deep, vibrant colours, crisp detail and no additional block or mosquito noise.
SP delivers virtually identical results, but eats up less space, making it perfect for copying a two-hour recording onto DVD. LP drops the quality considerably, but keeps the picture watchable, while EP's low-bitrate pictures are only suitable for slow-moving material.
You're also getting a top notch DVD player into the bargain. Pre-recorded discs are cleanly reproduced in 1080p, with the deck offering a similar level of quality to a decent budget player.
Sound
This deck is no replacement for your CD player, but music sounds enjoyable through the analogue outputs. The Dolby Digital encoder also does a great job of capturing stereo TV sound, making speech clear and audible. And, although it doesn't make much difference, you can choose to record in XP mode using space-hungry linear PCM.
Value
Another year, another impressive HDD combi from Panasonic. The DMR-EX83 once again offers a generous range of features and a faultless picture performance.
But it's not all hunky dory: the EPG is poor, some aspects of the operating system are clunky and there's little difference between this and last year's models. At this price, we'd have expected some new additions, such as a second digital tuner or Freeview HD support.
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5 handy apps to monitor Windows system resources
When your PC seems slow or unstable, or you think it might be infected by malware, your first step should be to take a very close look at the processes it's currently running.
The question is, how do you take a peep under Windows' hood and find out what's ailing it?
You could turn to the Windows Task Manager, but that provides only basic information. If you want an in-depth report – something that makes it easy to spot and control unnecessary, resource-hungry or malicious processes – you'll need to try an alternative.
Here are five of the very best apps available to download.
1. What's Running 3.0
At the heart of What's Running is a Task Manager-type display of all the processes running on your PC. Clicking a process will display a graph showing its recent RAM, CPU and I/O activity great for identifying programs that are hogging your system resources.
If you don't recognise a process, right-clicking it reveals a 'Check online' option that compares its name to an online database and will usually give you more details about it.
What's Running crams in plenty of functionality. Its tabbed interface shows you running services, loaded drivers and DLLs open internet and network connections, start-up programs and basic system information. The program even provides a snapshot feature to save all this information.
You could set a baseline snapshot this month, say, then compare it with another next month to see what's changed. This is helpful if you're trying to find out why your system has suddenly become unstable.
What's Running has one or two problems: we found the interface occasionally confusing and it won't list the files, Registry keys and other Windows objects opened by your processes. The program does make it very easy to access a great deal of useful system information, though, and it's definitely worth a look.
2. Process Explorer
Launch Process Explorer and you'll see a colour coded tree view of your processes that makes it easy to see what's running. If you spot a name that looks unfamiliar, simply right-click it, select 'Search Online' and the program will launch a web search to help you discover what it is.
Click a process to reveal the DLLs and other modules it's loaded, as well as the files, Registry keys and other Windows objects it has open. Doubleclick to display a process's performance graphs, open network connections, thread details and more.
There's even a Strings tab, which displays text strings inside the executable file – very useful if you're trying to identify malware or find out what a particular process is doing.
Process Explorer doesn't have as many extras as some of the competition (there's no list of start-up programs, for instance), but that's because it concentrates purely on Task Manager-type functionality. In fact, it's produced by Microsoft. It's lightweight, extremely reliable and portable, making it a must-have for your troubleshooting toolkit.
3. Anvir Task Manager
Check out the Startup tab in Anvir Task Manager – it gives you control over all the processes that are launched when Windows starts. Its Log window records major PC activity, such as processes started and windows opened.
There's also Tweaker for Windows, a TweakUI-type app that provides easy access to more than 100 hidden Windows settings.
4. Process Hacker
This tool's top features include a Services tab, which you can use to view, stop and start services; a Network tab that displays open internet connections; a Hidden Processes tool that detects simple rootkits; and an option to trim the working set of selected processes to help free up RAM on your machine.
5. System Explorer
This program is particularly good when it comes to identifying mysterious processes. With just a couple of clicks, you can look up a process name in the software's own database, search for it using Google or upload its file for a malware check at either virustotal.com or virusscan.jotti.org.
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Review: John Lewis JL22LCDHD
This 22-incher from John Lewis is reasonably styled, with a gloss-black screen surround and a silver rim, but at 19cm deep it's still fairly chunky. The ugly black plastic remote control seems to scream of cost cutting, but it's dead easy to use.
The dial-style wheel is very responsive and the all-important volume and channel changing buttons are big and well placed. Once tuned in, Freeview channels are presented in a smart-looking seven-day EPG that could be bigger: only two hours of schedules across six channels can be viewed simultaneously.
Dive into the clean, hi-res graphics of the onscreen menus and you'll find a number of picture presets are provided (standard, dynamic, etc), but it's possible to tweak contrast, brightness, colour and sharpness and assign it to your own user preset.
Performance
While the JL22LCDHD's viewing angle is reasonable, the panel's quoted 450cd/m2 brightness and 1,000:1 contrast ratio don't sound too promising.
However, pictures from the Freeview tuner are more than acceptable. A touch ripe, perhaps, and some channels are marred by a veil that removes the depth, but that's largely down to broadcasters' bitrates.
Colour and contrast hold up well, even if the latter consists of a 'black hole' approach that leaves little detail visible within shaded areas of images. That's not a major issue if you intend to watch digital TV, but it will be an annoyance if you want to make use of the screen's full HD resolution and play Blu-ray discs.
We wouldn't expect a 100Hz feature on a set such as this, but pans across New York in Hancock do suffer from judder, though blur rarely interrupts an impressively detailed image.
Unfortunately the sound doesn't match the picture. Despite very rudimentary presets for music, film and news, the JL22LCDHD's speakers boast just 3W of power, which results in tinny and bass-less audio that detracts from the picture. Dialogue-based fare is fine, but music and films are considerably less impressive.
It lacks the smoothness of bigger, more advanced TVs, but taking into account the price and size of this TV, pictures on the JL22LCDHD surpass all expectations; it's just a shame about those speakers.
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Review: Hannspree ST19AMBB
Hannspree is perhaps best known for its novelty TVs, but the manufacturer also produces a comprehensive range of modest sized budget sets, such as the ST19AMBB.
The TV sports a black plastic frame, and the company has thoughtfully provided a cloth for cleaning smudged fingerprints on the bezel and screen. Overall though the set's build quality is rather flimsy.
The connections roster is very basic, but there's also a PC input, enabling you to use the TV as a computer monitor. Annoyingly, the side-mounted aerial input protrudes at an unsightly angle, ruining the TV's already dubious aesthetics.
The onscreen graphics are simple and functional, but they are rather small and difficult to read and the muted colours and uninspiring design results in a lacklustre effect.
The remote control is fairly standard and looks over complex, considering the TV's sparse feature list. However, the most commonly used buttons are comfortably positioned and easy to use.
Performance
The slightly unusual resolution and the 16:10 panel, rather than the more conventional 16:9 widescreen ratio, means that pictures can appear slightly misshapen.
Overall picture performance is acceptable, but not great, with the visible backlight proving particularly distracting. Black levels are poor, with detail almost completely lost in the murkiest corners of the screen. Colour reproduction appears a little sketchy, too, with hues taking on an unrealistic quality.
Motion handling is also a problem, with standard-definition pictures suffering from a fair amount of blurring. HD is better, but does appear somewhat soft.
We wouldn't expect too much from the sonics on a TV of this size, but the performance here is rather below average. The speakers sound very tinny indeed, particularly as the volume is upped. There are a few different sound options, the best of which seems to be the Movie mode which adds some much needed base.
Although the ST19AMBB has a recommended retail price of £200, you should be able to find it in shops for less and it's available online for as little as £125, making it a real bargain set.
If you're after a small, low budget screen then this panel does deliver a reasonable performance after a fashion, but if you're after quality it may be best to look elsewhere.
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In Depth: 10 really useful Chrome browser extensions
One reason many Firefox users cite for not moving to Google Chrome is Firefox's array of extensions and plug-ins. Even Internet Explorer is easy to extend with toolbars and other utilities.
However, Chrome is catching up. If you want to add extensions, you need to install the Beta channel version of Chrome, which you can download from here.
The range of options is growing steadily, but what are the top picks?
1. Google Calendar Popout
This enables you to check your Google Calendar on the fly without having to visit your calendar's page. Just click the 'Calendar' icon to see a view of the current month, plus a handy list of appointments on any selected day. It can also warn you about imminent events.
2. Better Gmail
This extension is similar to one produced for Firefox by the Lifehacker crowd. It enables you to remove distracting elements such as Google Chat and adverts. You can also turn on neat features such as attachment icons that show the type of file attached to an email before you open it. Just click the extension's icon and then tick each of the options you want to enable.
3. Google Mail Checker Plus
There are numerous mailchecking extensions for Chrome. This add-on is nicely designed, providing the ability to check multiple accounts and showing the number of waiting messages. If you move your mouse over the icon, you can also see previews of these emails to help you to decide whether you need to open the message right now or not.
4. WOT
WOT stands for Web of Trust – a service that provides feedback on websites before you visit them. It can flag those that deliver malware or spam. It also lists shopping sites that are known to cheat customers and provides age-related ratings for site content. Other users rate the sites they visit and this information is appended to the search results you receive from any major search engine.
5. AdBlock
Remove irritating Flash animations and other adverts with this tool, which uses similar technology to AdBlock Plus for Firefox. You can enable Google text adverts so you don't cut off the income stream of your favourite sites, but it will target adverts based upon live filter subscriptions.
6. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer
Avoid the need for a locally installed PDF reader by opening PDFs in Google Docs. Once installed, right-click a link to a file and choose 'Download'. The file is downloaded to your PC and then opened in the Docs interface. You can search open PDFs by keyword.
7. Google Translate
This is a very handy extension if you visit a lot of foreign language websites. Click the 'Translate' icon on your toolbar to translate the current page into a different language, which you can select from a dropdown list. If you visit a page that's in a different language to the default one set for Chrome, you'll be presented with the option to translate it via a banner at the top of the page.
8. IE Tab
Some sites still only render correctly in Internet Explorer. IE Tab enables you to open pages using IE in a new tab within Chrome, so you don't need to switch browsers. It's ideal for checking the way your own site renders in IE, as well as giving you seamless access to troublesome ones that won't play ball with Google's browser.
You can even specify certain URLs that will always open in IE Tab. This extension is for Windows systems only, because you need IE installed for it to work.
9. FlashBlock
This extension prevents Flash elements embedded in web pages from playing automatically in Chrome. Where the Flash object would normally be, you'll see a placeholder graphic instead. If you choose to, you can click this to download the element and view it once you've determined that it's safe.
You can also whitelist a particular site by pressing [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[F] when you visit, so that any Flash elements it contains are aways displayed.
10. VidzBigger
This tool enables you to scale YouTube and similar video sites so that the video player itself is the dominant element on the page. It's particularly effective for high-definition media. Where available, the extension also provides a download link for the video. Related videos and other information, such as comments, are presented in a handy scrolling pane on the right-hand side, so you aren't forced to move the video out of view in order to see them.
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