Since its 2008 release, Google Chrome has been steadily gaining popularity and gaining an increasing market share among internet browsers. The browser upholds Google’s reputation of innovation and industry dominance, proving to be the go-to browser for the masses. Chrome’s appeal lies largely in its simplicity and speed, while surpassing the competition in both. Below you will find a wealth of Chrome’s useful features and functions.
1. Search by site
In the Chrome address bar (sometimes called the “omnibox”), type ‘site:’ followed by your keywords to restrict a search to a particular website. For example; site: emailanswers.com will bring you to all of the indexed pages for emailanswers.com. If you add a specific search term at the end of the site search, ie. site:emailanswers.com email validation, this will search only emailanswers.com for the keyword email validation.
2. Browse files
Chrome offers a simplistic file explorer — try typing ‘C:’ into the address bar and click Enter to browse your hard drive.
3. Check memory usage
Enter ‘chrome://memory’ into the address bar to see where all of your RAM is going. Try ‘chrome://chrome-urls’ to see the other diagnostic shortcuts that are available.
4. Rearrange apps
Click and drag an app on the Apps page to change its position – drag to the far right to create a new page of apps.
5. Manage handlers
Visit Content settings (under Privacy on the Settings page), then click ‘Manage handlers’ to change the applications used to handle email and calendar links inside Chrome. 6. Privately view any web page
6. View webpage privately or incognito
Like most browsers, Chrome has an incognito mode that disables history logging. Open up an incognito window whenever you want to quickly check how a site, such as your Facebook page or Google+ profile looks to someone who isn’t signed in as you. If you’re using Windows, Control+Shift+N opens a new incognito window.
7. Disabling spellcheck
If you don’t like Chrome correcting you on your spelling, you can disable the feature under the “languages” heading on the advanced settings screen.
8. Switch between Google accounts
Use the ‘Add new user’ button on the Settings page to sign in using another Google Account. You can then quickly switch between them by clicking on the user icon in the top-left corner.
9. Reopen a tab closed by accident
If you’ve just closed a tab you didn’t mean to, right-click on the tab bar and choose Reopen closed tab to bring it back.
10. Highlight to search
Highlight a word or phrase on any webpage and then right-click and you’ll find an option to search the highlighted word or phrase in Google search, which will open in a new tab.
11. Find text in a web page
Press Ctrl+F at the same time and type your text in the newly open find box to find keywords in a page. Matches will be highlighted in yellow.
12. Zoom In
Use the Ctrl button in conjunction with your mouse’s scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
13. The address bar is a calculator
Type a calculation into the address bar to see the result in the suggestions without even hitting Enter.
14. Stay in sync
Sync some, all or none of the following by signing into Chrome with your Google account: apps, bookmarks, extensions, auto-fill data, passwords, open tabs, search bar history, themes and settings.
15. Analyze web pages
Right-click on a web page and choose ‘Inspect element’ to see the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other resources it’s made up from.
16. Go further back
Click and hold on the back button to see a list of recently visited pages for the current tab.
17. Change the theme
Like Gmail, Chrome comes with a range of official and unofficial themes. To change the theme, click ‘Get themes’ on the Settings page to browse the selection.
18. Delete and wipe out everything
Clear everything in Chrome’s memory by hitting Ctrl+Shift+Del, ticking all of the boxes (from history to cookies), selecting ‘the beginning of time’ as the timespan and clicking ‘Clear browsing data’.
19. Enlarge text
If you can’t quite make out the text on your screen, you can increase the default text size via Settings > Web content > Font size.
20. Change History
Head to chrome://chrome/history and you can remove specific pages from your browsing record via the check boxes and the ‘Remove selected items’ button.
21. Edit most visited sites
If there’s a thumbnail on the ‘Most visited sites’ page you no longer want to see, click the cross in the top right-hand corner of the image to replace it with the next most visited site in Chrome’s list.
22. Change Chrome Version
As well as the stable version, Chrome is available in three additional versions, which get increasingly more cutting edge and less stable. You can choose from the Beta, Dev and Canary. Search for Chrome Release Channels to try out a new version and switch between them.
23. View background tasks
Chrome is powerful enough to have its own task manager. Press Shift+Esc to see what’s running in the background (typically extensions and offline caching tools), alongside your open tabs, and how much CPU time and memory space each one is taking up.
24. Pin tabs
Pinned tabs will compress along to the left-hand side of the screen, take up less room and in some cases (e.g. Twitter), they glow if there’s an update to the page. They also keep their places whenever you start up Chrome in the future. Right-click on a tab title to access the pin tab option.
25. Go offline
Keep emailing even when your online connection is down with Offline Gmail from the Chrome Web Store. Google promises more offline apps are on the way.