Chrome Extension of the Week: Speed Dial

Posted 01/27/2010 at 11:00am | by David Murphy

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One of Google Chrome's more useful features is its ability to display recently opened Web pages and your most-visited Web pages via a little visual table whenever you open up a new, "blank" tab. For the Web surfer with a limited range of interests or for those interested in a quick way to hit their favorite sites in one go, this functionality is miles ahead of Firefox's, well, blank tab. But here's the problem: You can't actually customize anything on Chrome's launching page. Or, rather, you can only pin and subtract.

What I mean by that is Chome lacks the ability to let you pick, from the start, exactly what you want to appear on your "new tab" page. If a site happens to make its way across your "most viewed" list and you want to stick it there, you can pin said side to your page by hovering your mouse over the image until its blue configuration frame appears. You use the same process to prevent certain sites from ever appearing on this page--I'm not going to ask what those might be. Other than that, you're stuck--unless you start refreshing a particular page to the point of annoyance just to get it to appear, you have no way to actually predefine or shuffle around these sites.

The Chrome Extension Speed Dial is your solution for complete and total customization of your new tab page in Google's browser. It's not perfect, but it's a welcome addition to any Chrome-tweaker's arsenal.

As far as extensions go, Speed Dial is fairly easy to use. Install it, and any new tab you open will pop up your brand-new Speed Dial interface in place of Google's old new tab screen. You'll be shocked to see a few things at first: you won't have any favorites, your bookmarks bar will be duplicated under itself, and your recently closed bar will have a lot more room for windows.

To add pages to your new Speed Dial screen, just fire them up in a normal tab and click on the giant multicolored box next to the "Type to search" text in your address bar. Deleting a previously saved page is as easy as right-clicking on the image and selecting the "remove" option. A fairly thorough configuration screen allows you to define the number of rows and columns that appear on your starting page, and you can even select certain elements on the screen to add and remove, or add a customized background if you so desire. Might I recommend the Mario?

Maximum PC picks one new Chrome extension as its favorite of the week each... week. Have a nifty extension that you can't live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.