I use the Internet a lot both for work and recreation, and I encounter numerous links throughout the course of a day that interest me for one reason or another. But instead 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.
There are other browser extensions for previewing web pages without having to actually click on the link to open them, but CoolPreviews is the 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 – 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 – Simply hover your mouse over a link to automatically open a preview window.
2 – Designate a hotkey 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 you’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 doesn’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.