Chrome: No one really likes Pandora's overly Flashy desktop player, nor do they like having to switch to an open tab just to change tracks. The unofficial Pandora Chrome extension lets you control Pandora from your address bar, using only your keyboard.
The unofficial Pandora extension adds a Pandora icon to your extension bar, from which you can see what's playing, change stations, thumbs up or down songs, skip tracks, and so on, just like on Pandora's web site—but without switching to another tab to do so.
That isn't, however, what makes this extension stand out. The developer has also added some really neat address bar support, that lets you pause, skip, or like tracks right from your address bar. You control it just like you would anything else from your address bar—just type "p", hit tab, and then execute a command like play
, pause
, skip
, like
, or dislike
, tired
, or even station
followed by the name of the station you want to play. It can even use Chrome's desktop notifications to tell you what song you're listening to. Note that you may have to restart Chrome after installing for some of its features to work.
Overall, it's an awesome way to listen to Pandora without the hassle of open tabs and clicking around. Of course, you could always just play Pandora in your Terminal too. The unofficial Pandora extension is a free download, works wherever Google Chrome does. Note that if you're running Chromium, you'll need to do a bit of extra legwork to make this extension work.
Pandora [Google Chrome Extensions via CyberNet News]
You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.