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A tech writer at Android Authority compiled ten practical features in Google Chrome for Android that they use regularly, including customizing the toolbar shortcut to open new tabs instead of Gemini, sharing links to highlighted text on a webpage, and forcing websites into dark mode. The list draws on years of personal use to surface settings many users may not know exist.
Brave has rolled out a new privacy tool letting users generate disposable email aliases when signing up for websites, avoiding exposure of their real address. Emails sent to an alias are automatically forwarded to the user's primary inbox and then deleted from Brave's servers, with account data encrypted at rest.
Anthropic is embedding its own browser directly within Claude Cowork, removing the requirement for a separate Chrome extension to handle many everyday browsing tasks. This lets Claude operate web pages and complete tasks natively inside its own app environment rather than relying on Google's browser infrastructure.
WebMCP is a new approach, currently running in Chrome under an experimental trial, that lets websites declare specific functions—like a book_table tool—that AI agents can call directly with structured parameters. This replaces the current method where agents must scrape raw HTML, guess which buttons or fields to interact with, and often break when a page's layout changes.
The uBlock Origin team has released version 1.74, which it says will be the last stable build available on the Chrome Web Store. Google plans to pull the extension from the store on August 31 as it finishes phasing out support for Manifest V2, the older extension platform uBlock Origin relies on. Chrome users searching the store are already seeing only the Manifest V3-based uBlock Origin Lite as a replacement.
Anthropic now lets Claude share memories between its chatbot interface and Cowork, its cloud-based computer-use agent, so context from regular chats carries into automated tasks and back. The update also adds a toggle letting users allow Claude to remember sensitive topics like health or politics, which are excluded by default, with notifications each time such a memory is stored.
Floccus is a free browser extension that synchronizes bookmarks across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and Kiwi, working on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. It lets users store bookmark data in Google Drive, Dropbox, self-hosted Nextcloud, Linkwarden, KaraKeep, Git, or a personal NAS via WebDAV, with optional password encryption for added privacy.
A developer's blog post examines 35 Mac applications and finds that most of their 'File' menus contain almost nothing related to actual file management, instead housing app-specific actions like managing passwords, events, or chats. The author proposes renaming the menu in each app to better reflect its real function, such as 'Password' for 1Password or 'Event' for Calendar.
Google has fully retired Manifest V2 extension support in Chrome, closing the workarounds that let power-user ad blockers like uBlock Origin keep functioning. Google frames the move as a security and maintenance improvement, though critics see it as tightening control over what extensions can do. Users left without full ad-blocking now have a handful of options, including uBlock Lite, other Manifest V3-compliant extensions, switching browsers, or running external tools like AdGuard.
OCR It is a Chrome extension that lets users draw a fixed capture region over a paginated document viewer—like a scanned book or locked PDF—and repeatedly screenshot and OCR that same spot with a hotkey, building a full text transcript as pages turn. An auto-run mode can capture, advance the page, and repeat until the document ends, all processed locally using a bundled Tesseract engine with no network calls or API keys required.