Tips and Tricks: Getting the Most Out of Your Google Chrome Browser

Being a Firefox fan for quite a while, it was hard for me at first to adjust and become comfortable using Google Chrome browser. At first Chrome just felt weird - strange yet simple - almost like I was using some sort of virtual Lego set.

It took me a little time to really start to appreciate it for what it is and figure out where everything was at. But after getting used to it, I found it to be a fantastic tool - a really nice browser that I came to use more than Firefox, Opera, and IE together.

Here are my tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Google Chrome:

Hot Keys to make life faster and easier:

CTRL + N = Start a new browser window.
CTRL + T = Start a new browser tab on the same window.
CTRL + B = Show or Hide the bookmarks bar.
CTRL + N = Start a new browser window.
CTRL + H = Go to a special page that shows your browsing history and lets you revisit pages.
CTRL + J= Go to downloaded files (you can also go to them by browsing to My Documents, then Downloads)
CTRL + (any number from 1 to 9) = Cycles through the first 9 tabbed windows 1-9 of a Google Browser box.
CTRL + TAB = Cycles forward through all viewable tabs on a Google Browser box.
CTRL + SHIFT + TAB = Cycles backwards through all viewable tabs on a Google Browser Box
CTRL + SHIFT + B = Launch the bookmarks window (view / visit / edit / manage bookmarks here)
CTRL + SHIFT + N = Start a new incognito browser window (incognito is a special mode with minimal tracking)
CTRL + SHFT + DEL = Clear the browser history for Google Chrome.
ALT + HOME = Return to google chrome home page, or the preview window of most recently viewed sites.
SHIFT + ESC = Start the Google Chrome Task Manager.

If you want to use the mouse to know how much free RAM is available for new pages using Chrome, right click your mouse on the blue area (between or after any tabs at the top of Google Chrome) and select Task Manager from the menu box that appears. It will tell you how much RAM is being used for Chrome, and how much is still free to add more tabs.

If you need to kill any tasks that have gone astray (just like with Windows systems or using PS -ax on unix) you can kill individual page processes with the task manager.

A powerful keyword: ABOUT
On the address bar, you can do regular google searches or searches with other engines if you just enter a keyword or phrase. But a really powerful keyword I discovered recently is called "about". You can just type the word about, a colon after it, and then any number of things you want Google Chrome to show you. Here are a few neat things you can ask it:

about: stats (get statistics for the browser)
about: network (get data on the network activity)
about: histograms (get client/IP data)
about: cache (view all current cached page data for google chrome)
about: dns (view all current dns data and prefetches for last few hostnames you visited with chrome)
about: plugins (view all current plugins you have installed with google chrome)

Getting Updates for Google Chrome:
Just go to the icon that looks like a wrench (top right corner), left-click it, and a menu comes down. You can see all the common tools you'll use there (bookmarks, etc), but there is a menu item that says "About Google Chrome". Left click where it says "About Google Chrome", and a Google Chrome splash will come up, tell you the copyright date etc, and at the same time...automatically check for updates, tell you if there are any, and let you download them if you need to.

Bookmarking Pages:

To bookmark pages, you can use CTRL + D (hold the control key down and press the D key while you do). It'll add the page you are on to the bookmark manager. You can just as easily use the mouse to click on the little star right next to the address bar (where you type out web addresses you want to go to), and that too will bookmark the page you're currently on.

Pop-out Pages:

Google has always been a fan of being able to pop boxes in and out of programs, and with Google Chrome they make it easy to do that with web pages on tabs! To create a new tab, just click on the "+" (plus sign) that you see. A new tab should appear, with either the home page (if you set one), or the default new google page that shows you the last visited sites you've been to. Visit any page you like on the new tab. Tabs are basically separate browser pages that are associated to the same box. You can separate these boxes and make them their own "pop-out" stand-alone pages by simply dragging-and-dropping a tab from the top of the screen to any other part of the web page area (generally, the white part) of a web page you are currently viewing. If you ever want to merge a separate google browser box back onto the tab list of another, just drag and drop the tab from a separate google chrome box onto the tab of the one you want it to go to, and presto! The tab and that page gets added right to one box. And if you want to, you can even drag-and-drop existing tabs in any order you choose on the same box or different boxes! Very useful if you want to view several pages at once and want to keep them in order, or just isolate one group of pages from another on a list. (You can do some of this on Firefox also!)

Make Google Chrome a portable program that can run off of a USB flash drive for use on any computer:
This is a bit more complicated than the above, and requires that you have a USB flash drive and a usb port available on a system to do this. You'll also want to familiarize yourself with the program and if at all possible, use a flash drive that you aren't worried about losing data on. Generally things don't go wrong especially with flash drives. But precaution is always the best policy. The directions to make it and place a self-contained google chrome it onto a flash drive using the Chromium code can be found here: http://stadt-bremerhaven.de/2008/09/03/portable-chrome-021510/

These are just a few of the cool and powerful features that you can do with the free google chrome browser. To download google chrome, merely do a google search with the words "download google chrome" and you will get to a link to do so. Enjoy!