12 Useful Web Tools You Didn't Know About

Google isn’t the only company creating useful apps for the web. There are plenty of great online resources not made in Mountain view, provided you know where to look. Here are 12 of our favorite online apps and websites that are worth collecting in your browser’s bookmarks, ready to go at a moment’s notice, to convert files, enhance photos, make GIFs, pick colors, transfer documents and more besides.

---

1) Improve low-res photos

Let’s Enhance is a slick and free site for improving your low-res photography. Blocky noise is automatically removed and some neural network smarts are applied to imagine missing parts of the picture and enlarge it in a smoother way. You need to create an account to see the end results, and then you get a choice of high-res enhanced variations to choose from.

---

2) Convert files between formats

Let’s get converting. (Image: Screenshot)

Getting a file in the wrong format is one of the most frustrating experiences of modern-day computing life. Converting them on your computer often requires shady shareware, so the online only Zamzar is a nice, fast alternative. While there are limits on file sizes on the free version (you can pay to increase the limit), the site supports 1,200 different conversion types, including audio, video, image, and document types, all handled in your browser.

3) Send files over the web

Services like Dropbox and Google Drive make sharing large files over the web easier than ever, but sometimes you just want to quickly fling a file at someone with no need to register or log in or anything else. Enter Firefox Send (yes, like the browser), which lets you drop any file into a browser window and send it via a safe, private, and encrypted link.

4) Check worldwide time zones




When’s that meeting scheduled for? (Image: Screenshot)

You can look up times in other parts of the world via Google or just stare at your watch and try and figure them out yourself, but if you bookmark TimeAndDate then you can have a series of world clocks up on screen whenever you want—you can pick your cities, and the order, and if you sign up for a free account you can access your clocks from any browser.

5) Scan files for virusesGot something dodgy lurking on your hard drive that you want checking out? Employ the services of Jotti Malware Scan—you simply upload a file through the web interface, and it then gets scanned in the cloud by a host of applications, including tools from Bitdefender and AVG. It’s particularly useful for checking email attachments before opening them.

6) Find out where to stream movies and shows



Can you stream (or download) it? Image: Screenshot

If you’re eager to watch a particular movie or show but aren’t sure where it’s (legally) available, then Can I Stream It? is a useful bookmark to have on hand. Type in the content that you’ve picked and the site scours Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, YouTube, iTunes, and various other platforms to see where you can buy or rent it, as a download or a stream.

7) Check on the status of a site

Don’t panic if you can’t get on to Facebook or Google Docs—at least, not until you’ve checked the status of the portal you’re trying to access via Down For Everyone Or Just Me. Type in the URL, click the link, and you can see whether the site is having problems or you are. You can look up site hosting information and scan for malware problems here too.

8) Make a GIF out of anything

Let’s get GIFing. Image: Screenshot

Everyone loves GIFs, and one of the internet’s best GIF resources also has a creator component that lets you whip up a quick animation from an online video or a file stored on your hard drive. Keep a GIPHY bookmark available in your browser, and you’ll always be able to create a GIF from just about anything in seconds, ready to save to disk or share.

9) Get serious with your sums

Again, sums are something you can do straight through Google, but the Desmos Graphing Calculator is definitely deserving of a spot in your browser’s bookmarks if you’ve got some serious maths to do. A host of functions, equations, and data plotting tools are supported, and it’ll do simple sums too. Use the menu on the left to see some quick example graphs.

10) Record quick voice memos



Get your thoughts down in audio form. (Image: Screenshot

Plenty of voice recording apps are available, but Clyp is quick and simple, and can be accessed right through your browser whenever you want to jot down an idea with your voice, or send a voice memo to someone else. If you want to be able to save clips to disk or keep them online for more than 24 hours, you need to sign up for a free Clyp account.

11) Find the right color combination

If you work in design or web development, you’ve got a lot of palette pickers to choose from, but Palette Generator is one of the best online ones we’ve come across. Rather than asking you to seed or scroll through a set mix of colors, it asks you to upload a series of images from your computer—it then generates interesting color schemes to match.

12) Keep the score

Check the winners and losers. Image: Screenshot

Scoreboardz is very simple but very useful: It’s a scoreboard that runs inside your browser that you can bookmark and call up whenever there’s a competition happening in the office or the living room. Enter the names of up to 12 players, choose your scoreboard background, and then simply click to increase or decrease each of the scores.

Source: https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/12-useful-web-tools-you-didnt-know-about-1820465619

Why Firefox Had to Kill Your Favorite Extension

Firefox 57, or Quantum, is here, and it’s a huge improvement. Firefox has finally caught up with Chrome in terms of speed, the interface is a lot cleaner, and there are some great new features to boot. There’s not a lot to complain about here.
Just kidding. On the internet, there is always something to complain about.
With Firefox Quantum, the complaint de jour is that certain extensions do not work anymore. Numerous high profile extensions, including DownThemAll and Greasemonkey, don’t currently work with Quantum. Others, including Firebug and ScrapBook, will likely never work again.
This is frustrating if you’re a user of one of these services, and you might think it’s somewhat arbitrary. It isn’t. Like it or not, Mozilla felt they didn’t have a choice but to abandon what it calls “legacy” add-ons in order to move forward. Here’s why.

How Legacy Firefox Extensions Worked

Traditional Firefox extensions were generally written in XML User Interface Language (XUL). This is the language Firefox’s user interface is built with, and XUL-based extensions could modify that interface directly. These add-ons also had near full access to XPCOM, the powerful component object model used by Firefox.
If that went over your head, just know this: Firefox extensions had a more-or-less total ability to change your browser, and they made those changes directly. This is why those extensions were so powerful: there wasn’t a prescribed set of things they could and couldn’t change. It’s also why these extensions tended to break with new Firefox releases.
Extensions for Chrome or Safari don’t work this way. Those browsers offer extension developers specific APIs they can use, meaning there’s a set list of things extensions can and can’t control. For two years now, Firefox has offered a similar API called WebExtensions, which it has encouraged developers to adopt.

Traditional Extensions Made Improving Firefox Difficult

Firefox Quantam isn’t the first update to break an extension: this has been an ongoing problem for years. Because Firefox extensions could affect Firefox so directly, it was possible for even minor changes to Firefox itself to break add-ons completely, or just introduce performance-sapping bugs.
Firefox users, not knowing the extensions were causing the problem, would assume the new Firefox version is buggy, and from their perspective it was. The Firefox team would do their best to ensure popular extensions were working before pushing a new version, but it’s easy to imagine all of this slowing down development.
The WebExtensions API makes all of this easier by specifically defining what extensions can do and how they can do it. This means developers only need to ensure that the API is functioning properly, and not worry that a performance tweak or UI change will break particular extensions. The result should be fewer extensions breaking in the long run, but to make this possible, Mozilla needed to abandon the old extension ecosystem.
The change also makes some of Quantam’s best features possible. The multi process capability, for example, is a big part of Firefox Quantam’s speed boost. Four separate processes handle Firefox’s interface and tabs, meaning Firefox can use all four cores of your processor instead of just one. This is a reality that the traditional extension ecosystem simply was not built for, and it’s hard to imagine making it work without a lot of layers of abstraction that would inevitably slow things down. Many upcoming changes to Firefox were similarly being held back by legacy add-ons, meaning the ecosystem had to change in order for Firefox to evolve.

Cross Platform Compatibility Was a Problem

Once upon a time, add-ons gave people a compelling reason to use Firefox over Chrome. These days, Chrome is by far the leader in terms of add-ons, while Firefox can feel like a graveyard of unmaintained extensions from years gone by.
Sure, there are a few Firefox extensions that you can’t get in Chrome, but Chrome has the bigger ecosystem by far. The new WebExtensions API won’t fix this overnight, but it does make it a lot easier for Chrome extensions to be ported over to Firefox because the language used to write extensions is similar enough to make porting superficial. In many cases, only a few tweaks are needed for a Chrome extension to run in Firefox, meaning there’s no reason your favorite Chrome extensions can’t come to Firefox now if you ask the developer nicely enough. This should lead to a flood of new extensions in an ecosystem that could frankly use it.

Firefox Was Already Losing Users

Some may argue that Firefox will lose users because of broken extensions, but it’s worth noting that Firefox was already losing users to Chrome at an alarming rate, and has been for years. Comparative speed and a lack of certain add-ons were not helping on that front, and Firefox Quantum aims to fix both those problems.
Is there a chance this will backfire? Sure. Some people will jump ship to Chrome, and others might seek out ancient forks that maintain the old extension ecosystem. But it’s not like things were going well before. Firefox needed to evolve to stay relevant, and this is how they decided to do it.

Developers Had Time to Switch to the New API

Some users won’t notice this switch has even happened, because the extensions they work with already use the WebExtension API. Other extensions haven’t switched.
This could be because the developer abandoned the extension a long time ago, or doesn’t feel like re-writing it to use the API. In some cases, the API doesn’t offer enough control to re-create the original extension, so developers are abandoning their projects. And in many cases, the conversion simply isn’t done yet.
Whatever the case, the extensions aren’t breaking because Mozilla changed something all of the sudden. WebExtensions has been part of Firefox for two years, and the deadline for updating extensions was announced a year ago:

By the end of 2017, and with the release of Firefox 57, we’ll move to WebExtensions exclusively, and will stop loading any other extension types on desktop.

Still missing an extension you depend on? This Google document is tracking several popular extensions, and provides alternatives to several common ones. This list is also useful.

Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/333230/why-firefox-had-to-kill-your-favorite-extension/