SwiftPreview is a free Chrome extension that lets you preview links on all popular websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Imgur, and many more by just hovering over the link. You do not need to click on a link to go to underlying webpage; just hover over the link and SwiftPreview will show you a nice preview of the linked page. In this manner, you can get a brief snapshot of the webpage and decide whether you want to open the page in its entirety. In addition to this, SwiftPreview also lets you preview YouTube URLs, so you can just hover over YouTube links and get a quick preview of the video.
SwiftPreview is a perfect extension for previewing shortened links, before you decide whether you want to open the complete webpage in your browser. In the screenshot below, I have moused over a link of my website and it shows a nice preview of that link.
Features of SwiftPreview Chrome Extension:
- Zoom Images: This Chrome extension zooms images when you mouse over them. This behavior will be exhibited on all the websites over internet.
- Zoom Facebook photos: This Chrome extension has special customization for Facebook photos so they are zoomed in a much nicer manner when you mouse over them.
- Preview Links: As mentioned earlier, this Chrome plugin will show you a preview of all the links when you mouse over them.
- Customize Preview Window: You can specify custom width and height of the preview window in settings of this extension.
- Time Delay for Preview: You can specify time for which you need to hover over a link, before the preview comes up.
- Show Preview with Shift Key: If you don’t want previews to keep coming up whenever you mouse over a link, you can change the behavior of this extension to show previews only when you press Shift key.
- Prerender Pages: This extension uses pre-rendering feature of Chrome to pre-fetch pages, so that the previews are generated quickly. However, this option will use more bandwidth, and can be disabled if required.
- Pin Previews: You can also pin any preview window. For that, just press Ctrl key when seeing preview window. Once you have pinned a preview, you can scroll through that to see complete contents of the preview window.
- Block Domains: If you don’t want previews to come on certain websites, you can block those websites in SwiftPreview settings.
Download and Install SwiftPreview Chrome Extension:
Being a Chrome extension, it is quite easy to install. Just go to extension page here, and click on “Add to Chrome”. That is it; you have successfully installed the Chrome extension.
After installing, you will see settings page as below. In this page, you can specify various options that we discussed above:
In this settings window, you can change the settings as per your liking. I would definitely change the behavior of preview window to come only when “Shift” is pressed.
SwiftPreview is a good extension to have and it enhances your internet browsing experience.
Also check out SeeIt Chrome extension that enables link previews on Reddit.