One Less App

People love browser plugins. There are thousands of apps available to you. It is a click and a browser restart away from making your life easier.

However, how do you know if program that you just put on your computer is safe? It may be sending information about you out to an unsafe location. The developer may tell you they are collecting this information in their privacy policy. Although, I’m willing to bet you haven’t actually read the privacy policy. Go ahead, admit it.

Also, how do you know that app was written by a competent person? Being active, it could actually slow things down and it is very likely you wouldn’t know it is doing it. The program may have been supported by the developer when it started but now she may have other interests and may abandon the project. So it may not work in a few months.

Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to install software? Well, if you use Google Chrome and you need to take a screenshot of the whole webpage, you are in luck.

A decade ago, we would maximize the screen and take a screenshot using the built-in screenshotting tool on the operating system. We would then scroll down and repeat until we got to the end of the page. Finally we would glue them all together to form one image. Of course, this is time consuming and error prone.

Over the years, we have automated this. However, sometimes those automated programs don’t come out exactly the way you want them to. So as a backup you may need to manually do a few pages.

In April 2017, Google Chrome released a feature available to everyone already embedded into the program. You can now take a full screen image of a webpage through the Developer Console. This video explains how to do it. Test it out. If you like it, remove those old screenshot apps. The one embedded into your browser is far superior and has been vetted by the Chromium community.