Chrome tips

When you download Chrome from the official website, it downloads a tiny installer that later downloads the actual files and automatically installs it on your PC. However, if you want to install Chrome on more than one device without having to separately download on each device, or want to have a Chrome installer offline with you on a USB, then the official installer won’t work. Thankfully, Chrome also offers offline installer on the official website, but it is hidden. If you want the offline installer, here is a post listing all the latest offline installers for Chrome.

If you need to access a particular website often — say your workplace website — then you can create a shortcut of it on your desktop to directly open it in Chrome when you want to launch Chrome. This is very similar to bookmarking, but you won’t have to separately open Chrome and then open the website from the bookmark, basically skipping a step. To do so, click on Chrome’s main menu and select “Create shortcut” from the “More tools” option. Now click on the “Create” button when the confirm pop up comes, and the shortcut will be created.

Chrome can also be used as a file explorer to access files on your PC. You can particularly use this feature to access files inside a corrupted USB drive that your PC explorer is unable to access. To do so, type USB drive address such as “E:/” or “F:/” and click on file:///E:/ that shows in the search results. Basically, enter the USB drive letter and add a colon and slash at the end to access it. This will open all the contents of the USB drive. Just drag and drop the files from Google Chrome to the destination folder in your PC, and they will be copied there.

With evolving web, more and more websites now offer a responsive design, which eliminates any need to zoom into the content. But what if there’s a caution message that is too small to read, or something in an image that catches your eye (maybe a bird, eh?) and you wanna dive in deep. With Chrome, you can enable the old pinch-to-zoom functionality on every web page, and zoom as much as you would like. Go to Chrome Settings > Accessibility and check the Force enable zoom option.

This Chrome for Android trick can be useful when downloading large files. Parallel downloading essentially divides the file in multiple parts for simultaneous downloading. This technique increases overall speeds, making your life less stressful.

• Open Chrome.
• Type Chrome://flags into the address bar and press enter.
• Search for “Parallel downloading”.
• When the option shows up, tap on the drop-down menu and select Enabled. Also read: Best Android browsers

Some websites don’t have apps, or maybe you would rather not use them. Pages and web apps can often work better and a shortcut in your home screen would be the ideal solution. Chrome for Android makes this possible with a few taps.

• Open Chrome.
• Go to your website of choice.
• Hit the three-dot menu button.
• Select Add to Home screen.
• Type name (or leave the default one) and select Add.
• You can drag and drop the icon where you wish. Alternatively, select Add automatically to let Android do the work.