Chrome tips

Here’s a cool Chrome trick that not may people know and it has to do with Chrome autofill. The autofill feature in Chrome is pretty great. It saves you from the hassle of entering your addresses and card details again and again. However, what if you have started using a different card or moved to a new place? Don’t worry, Chrome lets you manually update the Autofill data. Just head over to Chrome Settings and click on “Autofill” on side bar. Here you will find three options; Passwords, Payment Options, and Addresses. Click on the one you want to manually manage. Now, click on the “Add” button and add the info that you want to add. For example, when I click on the “Add” button in the addresses option, I get a form to enter the address that I want to use as a part of my autofill settings, as shown in the picture below.

Chrome’s notifications feature is great. However, it can get annoying too, especially if you allow many websites to send you notifications. Also, it’s important to note that these notifications arrive even when you’ve closed Chrome. Thankfully, you can block Chrome notifications. On a PC or Mac, go to Chrome Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Site Settings. Here, click on the “Notifications” section. Now, you can either choose to “not allow any site to show notifications“. To do that, just turn off the toggle marked in the picture below. If you want to block notifications from a particular website, you can click on “the three-dot menu” next to the website link and and do the same. On an Android device, you can go to Chrome Settings -> Site Settings -> Notifications, where you will find websites that bring you notifications. You can then tap on a site and in the permissions section, choose “Block”.

Chrome features a number of great keyboard shortcuts that can surely make things faster for you. Here are the most useful ones:

• Ctrl+1-9: You can switch between different tabs with these shortcut. Here, 1 is the first tab and 9 being the last.
• Ctrl+Tab: This keyboard shortcut lets you switch to the next tab on the right. You can move to the tab on the left by using Ctrl+Shift+Tab.
• Ctrl+Shift+N: You can open Incognito mode with this shortcut.
• Ctrl+Shift+T: Accidentally closed a tab? Hit this keyboard shortcut to quickly reopen it. You can also hit the key multiple times to restore multiple tabs.
• Ctrl+Shift+Delete: This keyboard shortcut takes you to the “Clear browsing data” page, where you can clear Chrome’s cookies, cache, history and other data.
• Ctrl+L: You can quickly move your cursor to the Omnibox with this shortcut.
• Shift+Esc: Want to keep a check on the memory hogging tabs? Hit this shortcut to open up Chrome’s task manager.
• Ctrl+W: You can quickly close a tab with this keyboard shortcut.
• Ctrl+N: Quickly open a new Chrome window with this shortcut.
• Ctrl+T: This keyboard shortcut lets you open a new tab. Note: You can use these commands on a Mac by replacing the Ctrl key with the “Command” key and Alt key with the “Option” key.

Chrome’s Omnibox is pretty powerful and can do a lot of things including making general Google searches, simple mathematical operations, searches inside specific websites, and more. However, did you know that you can directly search for your emails using the Chrome Omnibox? Well, if you didn’t know that then this point will come handy to you. You will have to set it up first for it to work. For enabling searching email from Chrome’s Omnibox, we will be using its “Custom Search feature”. First, head to Chrome settings and click on “Manage search engines” in the Search section. Now, click on the “Add” button and enter the name (use Gmail as we are creating a search for Gmail) in the first field and the shortcut in the second field. In the last field, you will have to add a custom Gmail search URL which is given below.

https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#search/%s

Now, click on the “Add” button to add this custom search. Whenever you want to search for an email, just type your custom shortcut and hit either the tab or the space button. It will turn the Omnibox into a search field. Now, type the query and hit enter to see your search results.

Most of us are familiar with split-screen mode on our Android devices which allows us to use two apps at once. However, not many of us know that we can even use the split-screen mode to display two Chrome tabs at once. To do this, first launch “Chrome” on your phone and then open a couple of tabs. Now go into the split screen mode as you normally do and select Chrome. Now, tap on the three-dots menu at the top right and then tap on “Move to Other Window”. As soon as you do that you will see that Chrome has opened two tabs in a split-screen mode allowing you to browse two websites at once. This feature can be really useful when you want to cross-check information from multiple websites.

Chrome comes with many hidden features which are quite easily accessible when you know how to access them. Take, for example, the right-click menu that nobody ever tries to access despite the fact that it’s present there all the time. When you right click on a Chrome’s tab, you can access many features. We already explained the pinning tab feature above. You can also use it to mute a tab and manage tabs. If you have a ton of tabs open and you want to most of them while keeping some of the open, you can do that by using the right-click menu. Right-click on the tab that you want to save and then select the “Close tabs to the right” option. This will close all the tabs that are to the right of the current tab.

There are times when we have a number of tabs opened in Chrome on our PC or Mac and to reduce the clutter, we decide to move some particular tabs to a new window. However, chances are, you are doing it by dragging each tab to a new window one by one, which is an annoying process. Thankfully, you can easily move multiple tabs in Chrome. You can do so via the Ctrl (CMD on Mac) or Shift key. All you need to do, is press hold the Ctrl key and select the tabs you want to move. Once done, just drag the tabs wherever you want. You can even use the Shift key to select a range of tabs in Chrome.