Google Chrome Tips and Tricks

Google Chrome is an awesome browser and many people including me use it everyday and it’s the default browser on their PC. It offers great features such as wide range of extensions, it’s simple to use, etc. but many of it’s amazing features are unknown to majority of it’s users. In this post I am going to cover those little but extremely useful Chrome tips and tricks that you may not be knowing till now. Read on and make your experience with Chrome even better than before!

Use Omnibar for more than just searching

Omnibar, if you are not known to is the address bar that sits at the top and just below the tabs in your Chrome window. You perhaps use this only for inputting websites URLs and searching for something but it’s not just limited to that. You can use it to instantly perform mathematical calculations and get answers for simple queries like “how many inches are there in one foot”.

Task Manager

Chrome even has it’s own task manager built in. Since each tab in chrome runs as independant service, it can be difficult to know the overall system resource usage. You can use it’s task manager for various reasons, like to know what extension or webpage is using most memory and making your PC lag. To open it, click on the ‘hotdog’ icon (the one with three stacked lines) and click on More tools and then click on Task manager or hit Shift+Esc to open it.

Chrome URLs

Chrome URLs are URLs that directly take you to specific locations such as download, extensions, etc. These may come in handy like if you want to know about the version of Chrome, crash logs, cache, etc. You can see the whole list of these URLs by typing in “chrome://chrome-urls”.

Delete an Auto-Complete Entry

Auto -Complete feature in Chrome is awesome, but sometimes you may want to delete an entry for some reason. To do that you don’t have to clear all your browsing data for the day or much. Just type in some phrase of the entry you want to delete and highlight it. Next, press and hold Shift key and hit the Delete key on your keyboard.

Search for results from a specific website

You may want to search of a specific term or topic on a specific website. To do that, simply type in your search query in the below format.
site:your-site-here.xyz search term
Like if I want to search for all the posts relating chrome on Dragon Blogger, I would type: site:dragonblogger.com chrome

Pin frequently used tabs

If there’s a site you always want to be open like your email or any other website for that matter. To do so, just open the webpage you want to pin, right-click on it’s tab and click on Pin Tab to pin it. You can even pin more that just one tab. You can’t close a pinned tab without unpinning it, and it would also reopen when you open your browser again.

See how a webpage would look like on other devices

If your internet connection is slow and you want to view a webpage, you can view it’s lighter mobile version using this method or if you just want to know how a specific webpage looks like on different devices. To do so, open Chrome’s  Developer Tools by pressing the F12 key on your keyboard. Now, click the little phone like icon on the top-left side. Now select the desired device from the Device drop-down menu, or you can also manually adjust the screen size. 

Sync all your Chrome data

You can sync your bookmarks, saved passwords, auto-fill data, etc. with your Google account. This is great if you use more than one devices and want all your bookmarks, etc. in all of those devices. Also, if you uninstall Chrome for any reason, you can be assured that all your data is secure on the cloud and you will get all your passwords, bookmarks, etc. when you install it again. To do so, simply sign in on Chrome with your Google account by clicking on the ‘hotdog’ icon and clicking on Settings. From there, you can also adjust your sync settings once you are logged-in.

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Hope this article will turn you into a Chrome ninja  ;-) and will make your browsing experience with Chrome even better!

Have some doubts or suggestions? Feel free to comment below!  :-)