Tech Friday: Browser extensions and MacOS wish list item
Posted By RichC on April 26, 2024
Making changes to the Apple MacOS, or my current MacBook Air M2 computer workstation setup, is something I hesitate to do when everything is working smoothly. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few things that I wouldn’t mind Apple addressing that “might” make my life easier.
First my tiny gripe … is that there isn’t a way to extend my MacBook desktop to access/control the iPhone (left) and iPad (right) in the above setup. There are so many times that I’m working on the Mac and “think” that I can move the cursor over to the iPad screen to make a quick change … but instead it needs to be “touched” with a finger (touch screen) … something that can’t be done on the MacOS. It really doesn’t make sense since Chromebooks and Windows devices have been touchscreen for years. Again, not a big deal, but obviously a decision to keep 
Apple users owning more devices.
Second, I hesitate to add browser based extensions, but sometimes it is just necessary. For example, one of my new favorites is the tab-auto-refresh extension. I have several tabs open on a Firefox browser all the time that I either keep alive and refreshing content on my older Intel-based iMac (off the photo to the right in the above) or a hidden tab or different desktop on my MacBook Air. For example, I enjoy keeping an investment website “alive” as it will log out automatically if no actions are detected. The extension can be set to refresh the tab on whatever interval 
needed to keep it alive. Also I track an online portfolio of an advisor that I follow and the auto-refresh can be set to update these spreadsheet prices or changes.
The Third is another extension that I use on both Firefox and Brave (Chromium-based) browsers that will pop open a browser-based Text Editor. Simple and easy to use.
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