In our everyday lives, we all use the Internet a lot both for official and personal functions, and we encounter numerous URLs/Ā web links throughout the course of a day that interest us for one reason or another. But instead of clicking each link to open the underlying page, I simply hover my mouse pointer over the link and hold down the Shift key to display a small preview window.
How do I do it?
By using a fantastic Chrome extension called CoolPreviews.Ā
Cool Previews is a useful web browser extension that lets you preview websites before clicking on links.
To use it, you just have to keep the cursor over the link for a second, and then place it over the little Cool Previews icon that appears to the right. This opens a tiny window where you can preview the site. Although you can’t browse the entire content of the webpage, you can still see what’s in it, and decide if you want to enter the site.
Cool Previews is an extremely useful extension for any type of user. With it, you can avoid malicious websites before accessing them. If the site isn’t what it says it is, you’ll know it beforehand.
There are other browser extensions for previewing web pages without having to actually click on the link to open them, such as ezlink preview, Hover Zoom, Page Portal, Simple Link Preview, etc.; but CoolPreviews is one of the very best of the bunch. This awesome extension not only displays a preview window, but it also lets you scroll through the page inside the window ā€“ and even click the links contained on the previewed page!
There are two ways you can use CoolPreviews to check out a web page without clicking the link:
1 ā€“ Simply hover your mouse over a link to automatically open a preview window.
2 ā€“ Designate a hotkeyĀ to use so that only the links you actually wish to check out will be previewed. As mentioned above, I prefer to use the hotkey method (I chose the Shift key, remember?). Note: After you install the extension youā€™ll need to adjust the settings in order to activate the hotkey.
CoolPreviews is free, but it only works with Google Chrome (there is a Firefox extension by the same name but it doesnā€™t have the same functionality as chrome version).
To add the CoolPreviews extension to Chrome, simply visit this page with the Chrome browser and click the Add to Chrome button.