If you are like me, go and install this to 'StayFocusd'

If you are like me, refreshing news.google.com or news.ycombinator.com or any of your favorite site atleast every five minutes to see what new has come there so much so that you don't even know where your time has gone, then I have found the ultimate solution.
If you are using Google Chrome (I don't think there is a better browser than that out there. If you haven't tried it yet, go download it here.  And go to the extensions gallery. It is like addons for Firefox and install the StayFocusd extension here.

With this you can set the add the sites which you think you waste most of your time on or on which you can't close the browser on, add those to the blocked sites list in this. And it will do the rest. You can have a ten minutes of time or configurable amount of time where all the sites in the list will be available. After that they will be blocked. You may worry that even in the evening or during the time away from work also these sites will remain blocked. There is a  solution for that also. Here are the options available

You can set various options like active days (to exclude weekends), active hours, daily reset time, allowed sites and even nuclear option - in which you can just specify which sites to allow. It will block everything else. Smart people might think that they can just increase the time when the feel that time is getting completed for the day. But they have factored such things also, the changes don't take effect till the next day. So you are completely blocked. 

Ofcourse you can close the browser and open another browser like IE or firefox but after using chrome, I am not liking to use chrome. 

Other cool extensions:

Other cool extensions which have made my life easier are Awesome Screenshot  which helps you to capture screenshots and annotate them and IE Tab. IE Tab is very useful to open some sites which are still in the dark ages and open properly only in IE. Actually we could boycott them but not using outlook web access if you work in an IT company is not possible. So IE Tab has finally blocked the final reason which I used to open IE. If you use an android phone, and you thought typing something on the url bar of phone browser is a pain, we have LinkPush extension which just pushes the link from your chrome browser to your phone. Amazing I say. 

Things which I miss in Chrome

I being behind a corporate firewall, am not allowed to use only IE6, the buggy browser from Microsoft. I had made a passionate plea to my company's IT team to allow us the luxury of using any other browser like Firefox or Chrome. But they never relented. Even with many companies pleading against using IE6 through IE6NoMore as it takes lot of time of porting their applications on IE6, it still remains the most used browser on the internet. I being a junkie for all things google, tried the google's browser chrome the day it was released and fell in love with it instantly. It matured quite fast from the bugs which stopped many websites from being loaded on Chrome to adding themes first and extensions next.

But I still Mozilla firefox, the browser which really let us know that there is an alternative to the boring and bug ridden IE6 for two things

One being the very well written firebug plugin. Chrome has something called developer tools which provides some of the functionalities provided by Firebug that it is not complete. There is a firebug plugin available for chrome here but the user comments under it suggest that it is extremely buggy. So whenever I have to work on a css issue, i will fire up my firefox and work on it.

Another thing which I miss in chrome is the CHM reader. I have many ebooks in chm format but they are not opening these days in IE due to some security update by Microsoft but that file can be easily opened in firefox in the CHM Reader addon. I hope these plugins are soon available in Chrome and I stop using other browsers completely.

Do you use chrome. If so what else do you think it misses?

Ofcourse, still some bank sites dont open well in chrome and still have to be viewed in IE6. Shame on them.!!!!

I think IE6NoMore website is directly targeted towards them