Web

At some point, a friend may ask to borrow your superfast smartphone to look up something on the Web. It's times like these when you really don't want any of your private search queries popping up in the autocomplete area for your friend to choose. Perhaps you were looking up something medically related, or some other personal matter--you want to keep it as private as possible. Follow these steps to erase the search history on your Android phone.

1. Open your mobile browser on the phone and head to Google.com if it isn't your default search … Read more

With YouTube's ever-growing popularity and our increasing obsession with cute cat videos, it's no wonder the online video service surpassed 3 billion views a day this year. According to YouTube, every American watches nine videos a day, but it's very possible that most of them are missing out on these tips and hidden features:

1. Link to a specific point in the video. You can link your friends to a specific point in the video (say, 30 seconds in) using what YouTube calls "deep links." While the video is playing, right-click it at the point you want to share and select "Copy video URL at current time." 

2. Discover new music. You can find YouTube's answer to Pandora at YouTube.com/Disco. Enter the name of an artist or song title and a playlist featuring songs similar to what you entered will be created and put on autoplay. There are also options to shuffle, repeat, and save the playlist. … Read more

Most personal music-streaming services rely on the cloud to keep your tunes flowing, but they all tend to limit how much you can stream unless you pay up. You could set up a server at home that delivers your music more or less securely wherever you want it, but for those of us who don't have the time, skills, equipment, or inclination to do so, there's Audiogalaxy. This "cloud music player" scans your music library and then streams up to 200,000 songs to any Web-enabled device. Here's how to get started:

The native HTML browser on Android phones often load mobile versions of websites automatically. Devices with large, beautiful screens, like the Samsung Galaxy 10.1, can easily take advantage of full versions. Sometimes Web sites give you the option to view the full version of the site, but not always. There's an easy way to force desktop versions to load, but first you'll need to access some hidden settings. Here's how:

Step 1: In the address bar of the Android browser, type, "about:debug" and hit the Enter key.

Step 2: Hit the Menu key … Read more

Currently, all iOS devices come with the Mobile Safari search provider set to Google. For most users Google works, and the thought of changing it will never cross their mind. For others who prefer to use Bing and Yahoo, changing the default search engine is preferred. This simple guide will show you how to change the default search engine on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. … Read more

In the battle to protect our data, passwords are the first line of defense. Unfortunately, passwords are a pain to manage.

We're told not to use the same passwords over and over, and we're discouraged from using ones that are easy to guess, but the complicated passwords Web sites and IT managers prefer--and often require--are difficult to remember. Many people continue to use passwords that are too simple: Help Net Security's analysis of 32 million breached passwords found that nearly half were trivially easy to guess.

Firefox 4 introduced app tabs, a highly convenient way to organize your favored Web pages. Instead of normal, wide tabs that open at the top of the browser, an app tab is a tiny tab that sits to the left. App tabs are convenient not only because they take up less space than a regular tab (an app tab is hardly any wider than the favicon it displays), but they also cannot be accidentally closed. When you quit Firefox and reopen it, however, you'll soon discover that your app tabs aren't saved from one session to another.

If you have only a handful of app tabs, it's easy to simply pin pages as app tabs each time you open them up. But if you use more than a handful of app tabs, the pinning process session after Firefox session is annoyingly time consuming. There is a word-around to this problem, though it's not perfect.… Read more

It's been a long time since CNET's first collection of Google Chrome tips, so we've got a new batch of tricks to help you get the most out of Google's browser. We've split our advice this time around into three categories: using Incognito, powering up with the "about:" commands, and keeping your hands on the keyboard with a list of 30 hot keys. You can download Google Chrome for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Tip one: Keep your browsing private with Incognito. Incognito mode is a private browsing mode that turns off the regular … Read more

The Android Market offers plenty of great apps, but using your device to scan through them all can be a pain, unless you already know exactly what you want and it's got a name that's easy to type on a teensy keyboard. Google recently added some sweet new options to its Web-based Android Market that make life much easier for those of us who are always looking for the next big thing.

If you've never used the Market on the Web before, you'll need to register your devices first. It's easy if you've already … Read more