Chrome - secure your microphone from spying sites!

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If you visit certain sites using Google's Chrome browser, and give the site permission to use your computer's microphone (to use speech recognition navigation etc), a researcher has discovered that the website could keep your microphone on even when you've left the site and think it's off - with no warning indicator that it's still on.

To secure your computer and stop sites using this vulnerability to eavesdrop on you using your mic, El Reg has suggested that you simply disable websites' access to your mic and camara. Here's how to do that, with pics:

1. In Chrome, go to the Settings menu (top right, click the 3 horizontal lines icon), then choose the Settings item from the drop down.

2. The Settings page comes up. Scroll all the way down to the end, and click "Show advanced settings":

3. Now in the "Privacy" section that appears (which in my view is an essential basic requirement and not an "advanced" setting, but another time…), click the "Content settings button:

4. Then you have to scroll down again to find the Media section, and make sure you select "Do not allow sites to access my camera and microphone", then click the "Done" button.

That's it! Obviously you'll have to change it if you actually want a particular site to access them, but remember to change it back afterwards.

I rarely use Chrome myself (here's reasons why I don't use Chrome), and this sort of security issue isn't exactly going to persuade me to change my mind!

Why I'll stop using Google's Chrome browser - problems with Chrome

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For a while I've been trying Google's free Chrome browser, but I'm now about to give up up. As someone who uses tons of tabs, and has them reopen on each bootup, Chrome's just not manageable.

Here's why - a litany of problems and issues which, unfortunately, I just can't waste any more time trying to fix.

1. No "most recently-used" tab switching (or MRU) as standard. It's the only way to implement switching, in my view, especially for "power users" who have lots of tabs open. Yes, there's MRU Tabs and Recent Tabs, but, especially when I've got lots of tabs open, they're nowhere near as powerful as TabMixPlus, which is my single most essential add-on for Firefox (and I regularly donate). And I want to use Ctrl-Tab for switching, not Ctrl-q! This is the biggest, biggest bugbear for me.

2. Crashing or freezing my entire Windows 7 system when trying to open locations or, especially, when close Chrome, often because of the Flash plug-in "not responding". Yes, I've tried disabling Google's own Flash player plug-in, then disabling Adobe's plug-in, but neither worked. I ended up disabling both to stop Chrome making my PC unusable whenever I tried to shut down. And if I need Flash for a particular webpage, I just view it in Firefox, IE or Opera. (I haven't tried reinstalling Chrome, as I didn't want to waste any more time on this.) Even without Flash, Chrome often still takes ages to open a webpage.

Tip: if you disable all versions of Flash in Chrome, it may come back whenever you update Flash generally, which you ought to do for security reasons. So after updating Flash, go back into Chrome plugins and disable Flash again.

3. Sometimes blanking out my webpages after I've gone offline. If I've disabled my internet connection, and yes I do that if I'm leaving the computer for a while, or if I've put the computer in sleep mode then wake it up, often my Chrome pages are completely blank. Firefox and IE etc don't do that, they display the same pages as before perfectly well, why Chrome does I don't know. Yes I have the Reload All Tabs extension, but sometimes it doesn't work and I don't have time to reload every page individually (which does work). "Waiting for cache" is another fun way to blank out my webpages and test the patience.

4. Here's another way Chrome often goes Nyah and refuses to show me many or indeed sometimes any webpages:

"The server at tech.slashdot.org can't be found because the DNS look-up failed."

(That happens even when Firefox, IE and Thunderbird are working fine, so it's obviously not my internet connection or my ISP's DNS servers that were up the spout.)

5. Using up way too much memory on my Windows 7 64-bit computer with 8 GB RAM. I'm talking up to 196 MB per tab in some cases! Firefox 12 uses far less memory, with many more tabs.

So yes, I'm exporting my Chrome sessions and history so I can access my important recent webpages in Firefox, and giving up on Chrome now.

Chrome tabs - how to export session using Session Buddy extension

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In my view it's not at all obvious how you export sessions (ie sets of tabs) from Google's Chrome browser that you've previously saved using the excellent Session Buddy add-on.

How to export a session from Session Buddy? It's the rather unobtrusive down arrow on the right, underneath the cog icon - I've outlined it in red below. Apparently it's known as the "Action" button, but it certainly isn't labelled as such!

So, first click on the session you want to export (on the left), then click that arrow I've outlined above, and you'll see Export at the bottom of the menu.

Click Export. Then you can choose whether to export URLs only or titles too, and whether to group by window (if you had more than one window saved to that session), as well as whether to export to CSV or a text file (or just copy the chosen content to your clipboard, then paste it elsewhere).

Took me too long to figure out that it was the little arrow, so I hope this saves someone else some frustration!