Tips & Tricks: Google Chrome

Google Chrome is another milestone in Google’s grand plans of world domination — and they are finding very few people who complain. Chrome is an extremely fast and lightweight browser. It packs in a ton of features in a minimal interface, and introduces some novel ideas to the whole idea of browsing. The top bar and the menu bar have been omitted completely, leaving a rather large space for browsing.

Inspect Memory UsageChrome has some advanced options for inspecting memory usage. Right-click on the browser tab in the start bar select ‘Task Manager’. You will get a window showing how much memory is being used by each tab in the browser. Now click on ‘Stats for Nerds’ and a new tab will open in the browser, with a process ID, name of the site, memory and virtual memory usage. The great thing about this feature is that if you are using other browsers at the same time, then the tab shows the memory usage by that browser as well.

Bookmarks

To bookmark a page, click on the star icon next to the address bar. To access the list of bookmarks at any point of time during browsing, key in [Ctrl] + [B]. To make it disappear, use the same shortcut again.



Incognito ModeChrome has a secret mode that allows you to surf the Web anonymously. On the top right corner of the browser, to the right of the address bar is the page control button. Click on it and select ‘New incognito window’ or [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [N]. The sites surfed using this mode will not appear in the history, and the cookies they store on the system will be deleted as soon as the tab is closed.



Make Google Chrome Your Default Browser

Click on the ‘Customize and Control Google Chrome’ button to the right of the address bar, click on ‘Options’ and under ‘Default browser’ click on the ‘Make Google Chrome my default browser’ button.



Navigation Tips

Right-click on the back and next buttons to go through a recent history of visited Web sites. Drag and drop any tab from the browser into the desktop to start a browser with just that tab open. To open a tab you have just closed by mistake, use the keys [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [T]. Use [Ctrl] + [1] to [9] to cycle through tabs from the keyboard.

Expand Text Boxes

This is a very useful feature for use in any kind of site that requires you to fill in text in a text area. When you come across a text area in a forum or a form in a Web site, just click on the bottom right corner of the text area, click and drag it as per your requirements.

Inspect Memory Usage By A Site

Right-click on any empty space in the Web page, click on inspect element. This is, by the way, how you view the source code of a site on Chrome. Once here, click on the first line of the HTML code, which will effectively select the entire site. Then click on resources. This shows up the usage of memory by each element in the Web page. You can sort the elements by time or by size. If you reload the page, every image and script on the page shows up in the graph and gets plotted in real time.