We've already mentioned other ways to power up Google Chrome. Before extensions arrived on the developer channel, Userscripts and bookmarklets were your only options. Both are still great ways to add some kick-ass functionality to Chrome. If you're running the stable or beta builds, you may want to stick to them for now.

• 10 handy Userscripts for Google Chrome users
• 15+ handy bookmarklets for Google Chrome (and other browsers, too!)

Now, onto the extensions!

If you have a favorite that I left off, feel free to share it in the comments!
Share

Mozilla's Camino, the lightweight Mac alternative to Firefox, is getting very close to a 2.0 release. The first release candidate is out now -- you can download it by checking for updates in an earlier version of the browser -- and it's got updates to appearance, security features and more. You'll notice a new, more Leopard-like look for the tabs and toolbars, making Camino blend in better with recent versions of OS X.

One of the best additions to the new version of Camino is a built-in Flash blocker. You can turn it on to block all Flash animations, and then add exceptions the sites whose Flash you actually want to see. Other security features include making use of Google Safe Browsing, which warns you when you're headed for a site that Google has blacklisted for malware or phishing. All-in-all, Camino 2 isn't as feature-packed as Firefox, or as pretty as Safari, but it's lighter than either one (and offers Firefox-equivalent page-load times using Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine).

[via TechCrunch]

When Opera 10 launched without one of its most-hyped features, Opera Unite, browser geeks had to install a separate build to test it out. Opera developers have now merged the two, integrating Unite into the main browser in Opera 10.10 Beta.

As we've reported before, Unite is a "web server within a web browser" that allows you to download and run various web applications. What does this mean for the average user? You can access your files from anywhere, and easily share them with friends.

The first Unite apps are all about sharing. There's a media player to share music, a general file storage app, a web server app to host sites, and even a "fridge" app where you can leave notes for your friends. Media Player will probably get a lot of the early hype, as it lets you stream music from your machine to another computer with iTunes, WInamp, or your other player of choice (as long as it supports streaming playlists). Unite is still in the early stages, but no other browser has even attempted to do what Opera is doing in this space.

When it comes to paring a browser's UI down to the smallest possible size, the discussion always seems to focus on Firefox. Granted, Firefox is a very customizable browser, and with the right extensions cleverly applied, you can minimize its UI. But as John Holdun notes, often overlooked in this regard is the fact that Safari is very capable of being pared down to almost nothing, and you don't need any add-ons to do it.

In fact, if you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is learn a few key ones and you'll be able to minimize Safari to a Title bar and tab bar. One warning - I've only tried this using Safari 4.0 on a Mac; I don't have easy access to Safari running on Windows, but I imagine that there are equivalents for the keyboard shortcuts I'm about to discuss.

Firstly, let's get rid of the Toolbar -- that is, the bar with the back and forward buttons, address bar, and search field. To hide the toolbar, click View > Hide Toolbar from the menu, or simply press the Command-| shortcut key. Don't worry, if you need to enter a web address quickly, you can either show it again using the same shortcut key combination, or better yet press Command-l to have the cursor automatically placed in the address bar. Type something and press enter, or tab to the search field and type something and press enter, and your page will open, and the Toolbar will immediately hide again. Slick.

The other desktop real-estate offender is the status bar at the bottom. Hiding it is just as easy - the shortcut key combination is Command-/. Like John, I tend to like to use the status bar to snoop on the destination address of links by hovering over them. This takes an extra step now, but the extra room gained by not constantly showing the status bar is worth the occasional inconvenience for me.

Just about everyone has a usb flash drive by now. Apart from all that data you're packing (which you no doubt have encrypted in case your drive gets lost -- but that's a post for another day), why not pack up your favorite web browser and take it along for the ride.

There are a lot more options than you think - here are 13 different options for users of Windows PCs. Don't see your choice on the list? Share it with us in the comments!

Mozilla

Portable Firefox (current) [download] and Portable Minefield [download]
John T. Haller's Portable Apps project is always right on top of the latest Firefox updates, so it's the place to go if you need the Fox in your pocket. The most recent unstable branch is provided as well, in case you want to test it without installing.

PocketFlock v2 [download]
The kicked-up Firefox remix for social networking types is also available in a portable version, thanks to enthusiast Dave Ferrite.

I admit it: Download Squad has been talking up Opera 10 all summer. We told you about its wicked-fast new JavaScript engine and the much-hyped Opera Unite, and then Lee told you why he hopes this latest version of Opera will get your attention. Now the day of reckoning has arrived: Opera 10 is here, for Windows, Mac and Linux. How does it stack up to our expectations? Well, there's some good news and some bad news. Good: the Turbo feature for faster browsing on slower Internet connections is in full effect. Bad: two of the most-wanted features - Opera Unite and the Carakan JavaScript engine - didn't make it into this release.

Is Opera 10 still worth going for? Well, it's definitely fast. I gave it a spin on some resource-intensive sites, and without any formal testing, I can say that page load times on my Mac felt at least as fast as those in Safari and Chrome. It also passes the Acid 3 Test with flying colors. Combine that with the slick-looking (and quite space-efficient) new UI and the Turbo feature, and you've got a legitimate candidate for your new favorite browser. And, when Unite finally arrives as a separate download, it should only get better.

Have you tried Opera 10? Will you be switching? Leave us your impressions in the comments.

Moneyseize is a very straightforward single-screen platformer with charming 8-bit graphics and music. The goal in Moneyseize is to, well, seize all the money.

You're in charge of the 'gentleman', and your job is to jump around in each level and collect all the gold coins. Your gentleman is attempting to build a skyscraper, and needs to collect 1000 coins to complete it. There are critters in most levels, and they also hold coins, and you must also avoid the various obstacles and hazards, like the prototypical spikes.

An interesting twist in the game is that while there are 25 coins available in each level, in many levels it is not possible to reach them all. As you progress through later levels, you can press switches that will occasionally change the layout of previous levels, making once impossible-to-reach areas reachable. Since you control which levels you visit from the map screen, the game takes on a bit of a puzzle flavor to go along with the straight platform style, which feels very reminiscent of early Mario Brothers games.

While I can't imagine actually completing MoneySeize, my building has already grown far larger than I ever intended it to get, just in testing it for this post. That's usually the sign of a good game.

While Lee has been lamenting the lack of attention to the latest desktop version of Opera, the browser's mobile version is far from obscure. In fact, Opera Mini is burning up the mobile market: not only is it the most-downloaded mobile browser, it's the most-downloaded mobile application, period. This is according to open apps repository GetJar, which has recorded 25 million downloads of Opera Mini. The number is so high partially because Opera Mini is so versatile, with versions available for Java, Android, BlackBerry and WIndows Mobile.

The 25 million figure might not be quite right, though, as GetJar's download page for Opera Mini only shows a little over 18 million downloads. According to a GetJar press release, Opera was only the 3rd most-downloaded app on the site in July. Perhaps the higher figures are a combination of Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, or there's some other reason why they don't mesh with the number I see on GetJar, so I'll give Opera the benefit of the doubt. Even 3rd place and 18 million downloads is a stronger showing than most people imagine when they hear "Opera."

On the other hand, it's interesting to see Opera claiming Most Popular Mobile Application status when there's still some debate as to whether it has more users than the mobile version of Apple's Safari. Of course, Safari wouldn't be included on GetJar, so this popularity contest is already rigged in Opera's favor. Opera recently retook the #1 spot in the mobile browsing market from the iPhone browser, but that's not including Safari users on Apple's other mobile device, the iPod Touch. All in all, Opera Mini is definitely popular, but to call it the most popular might be misleading.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Do YouTube and other Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem that affects both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox, and the problem (surprisingly enough) turns out not to be Flash - it's Firefox's session restore feature.

Lifehacker has a post based on information that one of their readers wrote in with. Basically, Firefox takes a snapshot of all of your open tabs every ten seconds, so that if you close your browser, you can open it to where you left off. Though you wouldn't think grabbing the plain text URL of a few webpages would be such an arduous task for the browser that it causes video to stutter, for some reason it is.

So what's the solution? Well, if you want to throw the baby out with the bath water, you can turn off the session restore feature altogether. A more sane solution is to simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in the filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000, which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds.

I can't tell you how happy I am with this little hack - it has already prevented me from cursing Firefox a few times today.

As if Facebook hasn't already taken over the world, reports are coming in that Netscape's founder Marc Andreessen is backing a new web browser (yes, another one of those) dedicated to viewing the social networking site we all know and love.

The browser dubbed RockMelt, which is still very much in the design phase, is supposedly being worked on by all-stars in the development world like Facebook for iPhone developer Joe Hewitt, Firefox creator Blake Ross among others. The project is being headed up by the engineer behind Netscape Navigator, Robert John Churchill.

The rumors also say that RockMelt has it's own URL shortener at me.lt,but information about the browser was quickly taken down from that page.

We're not sure if this is going to be a client for Facebook or a browser that lets you browse the web while keeping your Facebook information, friends and news feed readily available. Either way, it seems kind of redundant to have yet another social media broswer (we all know how others like Flock are doing in this area).

Also, the rumors that people like Andreessen, Hewitt and Ross are behind this is strange. They're all very "web-savvy" guys and usually really in-tune with the noise surrounding social media sites and web browsers. At this point, there really isn't enough information to tell which direction this is going to take, but with all the Facebook clients and web-based operating systems already out there, this seems a little much.

[via Read Write Web]

"Daddy, what's a bookmarklet?" A childish question, perhaps, but not a question a child might ask. The kid might also call them favelets if he was raised on a diet of Internet Explorer. A bookmarklet, or favelet comes from "bookmarks" and "favorites" that you would save in your browser. Bookmarklets are Javascript applications in the form of URLs, and wherever you can store a URL, you can store a bookmarklet. Usually you drag them from the page to your bookmark bar, or you can add them like any favorite or bookmark.

A bookmarklet functions much like a button, but instead of just taking you to a website (like your garden variety bookmark), it does something at that website as well. As I said, it is an application. Some bookmarklets are used to modify a website, even if the effect is an illusion on your machine. Javascript can do some crazy cool things in a browser, and bookmarklets can similarly do some crazy cool things. Unfortunately each browser handles Javascript just a bit differently (and different versions of a browser will behave differently), so your mileage may vary.

Bookmarklets are commonly used to quickly tie into websites that allow you to share information. For example, this handy Delicious bookmarklet that allows you to easily save a URL to your Delicious bookmarks. Normally you'd copy the URL, go to Delicious, then paste it in to the right place and fill out the metadata. With the bookmarklet you simply hit the button (the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar, or elsewhere in your bookmarks) and it will take whatever site you're on, send you to Delicious, and fill out the URL and title. It usually suggests some tags as well.

Lots of sites provide handy bookmarklets, including VodPod, Tumblr, Reddit and FriendFeed. But here are a few resources you might find handy or fun:

• The Internet Archive has a Wayback bookmarklet so you can see previous versions of a website instamagically (scroll down a bit).
• Prank your friends with the ability to edit any website (well, not Flash sites) using this fun bookmarklet.
• Opera users? Here's a pile of bookmarklets just for you.
• Ever wanted to read some text on a web page in big text, one word at a time? Check out the nifty Spreeder bookmarklet to do just that.
• Finally there's the spiffy Rollyo, which adds a search to any page you visit. Plus, you can save your searches for later.

If you missed it the first time, Lee recently put together a list of 15+ handy bookmarklets.

[Hat tip to Lifehack for another excellent list of bookmarklets]

If there's a Gmail equivalent of adding a zillion toolbars to your browser, then I'm the poster boy. I've added so many lab features and gadgets that my Gmail functions rather... differently. But I'm all about simplifying, and the Firefox add-on Integrated Gmail does just that while also giving you a window into more Google services in a top-down view. The pic above shows you "minimalist" mode and is an incredibly slimmed-down version of Gmail, Reader and Calendar. Integrated Gmail also supports custom URLs and Gadgets like Remember the Milk, so you're not just stuck with Google stuff like Picasa, Notebook, etc.

Be aware that this does a lot of fancy Javascript work to make things happen, so a few Labs features will cause conflicts. I had enabled the ability to move nav columns around, which it didn't like. Also, even in settings you'll see Reader, Calendar, etc. So if you're not keen on seeing this in every single screen, you're kinda stuck with it.

That said, if you live in Gmail and you need a simplified dashboard, this is a nice little add-on to Firefox. The developer is asking for $5 donations, which is pretty reasonable for keeping your mind uncluttered.