In case you're one of the millions of people who are sick of Facebook's new design, and want to change the way it looks, there's a simple solution called PageRage. It won't tweak things to look like they did before, but it will let you to do one of the things Facebook has never allowed--theme your profile.
Like competitor MySpace has allowed for years, PageRage lets you customize both the background and design elements on your profile. There are a handful of pre-sets to choose from, all of which you can browse right from the company's Facebook application. To install them you simply click a button and it will apply the skin.
The one caveat of the service is that others must have the extension installed in order to see your special profile. It's also browser specific, so if you have it installed in Firefox but not Internet Explorer you won't be able to see the layout you've picked. However, changes made in either browser will be reflected in both since the information is stored on PageRage's servers.
For now, you're limited to making edits on your profile. In the future, the company plans to let its users customize other people's profile themes, although not for everyone else to see. Parent company Yontoo also makes a handy browser add-on called Sanity Switch that can turn off a user's MySpace profile customizations with a single click, making noisy, or otherwise obnoxious, social-networking profiles a little more bearable.
PageRage's Facebook profile skins are quite classy, although you'll need a special browser plug-in installed to see them.
(Credit: Yontoo Technology)Google Chrome Backup is a bit ahead of its time. The customizable features in Chrome are so few at this point that it's not hard to memorize your settings. Still, that's annoying, and so this freeware steps into the memory gap. Google Chrome Backup also creates user profiles, useful for mutliuser machines with one log-in.
Google Chrome Backup saves and restores your Chrome settings, and creates new profiles on the fly.
(Credit: Parhelia Tools)To create a user profile, simply click on the New Profile button and follow the instructions. Once created, you can use GCB to switch profiles, or drag the new profile to the desktop to create a shortcut. Backing up a profile is as simple as hitting the Backup button and choosing a profile to save the settings to. Hopefully, future versions will include the ability to save browsing histories--if it is a current feature, it didn't work during my tests.
The interface is pleasantly reminiscent of Google Chrome itself, with a clean layout and a plethora of options hidden behind slick drop-down menus. I could've done without the ZIP that bundled the small EXE, since it added an extra and unnecessary step to the installation process. That's a minor quibble, though, and the program performed as promised.
With add-ons and other customizations in the offing, though, Google Chrome Backup is well-placed to make sure that insidious errors and benign new computers don't prevent you from making an easy-to-replace record of your favorite tweaks.
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