Top 10 Chrome tips

Enable Floating Keyboard

You can enable the floating keyboard if you are using your Chromebook in a tablet or tent mode. It will help you type using the touch-screen display. So to enable it, open Settings and click on “Advanced” from the left-pane menu. Here, scroll down and open “Accessibility”. Now, just enable the toggle for the “on-screen” keyboard. Now, a keyboard icon will show up on your shelf. Click on it and voila, the keyboard is on your screen.

Open the default new tab page

If you have installed a Chrome extension that customizes your new tab page, you can open the default new tab page from here: chrome://newtab

Better Facebook Experience with Chrome

The Facebook app is well-known for its hefty battery consumption. The app alone could steal 10-20% battery in the background, leading to a significantly less battery life. However, you can deal with this problem pretty easily by making use of Chrome and its features. The first thing? Just throw-out the Facebook application from your device by uninstalling it. Next, use tip #5 to pin your Facebook profile/timeline to your phone’s homescreen. This will allow you to access Facebook directly from the homescreen, just like you would have opened the app. Facebook integrates well with Chrome and supports push notifications, just like you would have them from the app. This gives us one last reason not to use the official app. The setting, however, should be enabled by opening Facebook mobile site on the device you want notifications on. Then go to Account Settings > Notifications > Mobile. Turn On the feature and you will be prompted to grant permission, just ALLOW it. This way, you will still be having undisturbed access to Facebook and at the same time, would also save some decent amount of battery.

Search Engine Settings

Chrome does not offer separate search box as normally offered by Firefox and Internet Explorer. Type keywords in the address bar and press enter to open the search results using your default search engines in the same window.  After typing the keywords use Alt + Enter to open the search results in a new window. Chrome address bar is referred as Omnibox which can be used to open an URL as well as for searching keywords directly. Learn more about Chrome Omnibox search here. Highlight any text in a webpage, drag and drop it in the address bar to get a search results for that keyword.

Bring up the Task Manager

Chrome has its own Task Manager —it shows you a list of all the open tabs and the background processes running in the browser at the moment, along with a number of system resources they’re using up. You’ll find the Task Manager most useful when you’re trying to troubleshoot problems with the browser, and you can quickly close down a tab or process by highlighting it and clicking End Process. To Open Task Manager, Press Shift + Esc or “Menu”  icon in the top right corner, click More Tools, and then Task Manager. If you want to get real geeky click the stats for nerds click at the bottom of the Task Manager.

Use the Auto fill feature

Use the Chrome Autofill feature for automatically filling out any online form with common fields such as your name, e-mail, address, etc. To enter the Autofill values follow the steps below.

  1. Click on the “wrench” or “Menu” icon in the top right corner.
  2. Click Settings
  3. At the bottom of Settings, click Show advanced settings…
  4. Click Manage Autofill settings under Passwords and forms.
  5. In the Autofill settings window, click the Add new street address button.
  6. Fill out all address settings you want to be saved and click ok.
  7. Once complete try out your Autofill using the below form. To enter the values click on any of the below fields and select the name of your Autofill.

Password Management

Securing your online accounts using a password manager is indeed a great move, however; if you are still stuck with off-codes, Google Chrome can help you with hard-to-decipher passwords. For this, ensure that synching is enabled on the computer. After this, launch the website and create your account. Then, Chrome will give a drop-down suggestion for the password while you input one. The passwords get saved in the cloud and can be easily accessed via passwords.google.com.

Resize Text Areas

Click and drag the bottom-right corner of text areas to resize them. For example, if you are submitting a comment on a website and the text area is small, you can resize it. Note: This will be available only on supported fields.

Cleaning Chrome

Your Chrome browser may get affected sometimes by several factors. Though it’s a speedy browser, if you find something to be fixed, consider using some of its in-built tools by navigating to Settings to select Advanced and then Reset and cleanup. Selecting a cleanup computer will activate the browser’s internal antivirus to locate and eliminate harmful software that can hamper your browser’s performance. In case, this option doesn’t work, select Restore settings to their original defaults to reset the new tab page, startup page, printed tabs, disabled extensions, search engine, etc. Besides, history, passwords, and bookmarks will not get deleted.

Useful keyboard shortcuts

In this section, we will look at the most useful keyboard shortcuts for Google Chrome. Here is the official (and complete) list of Chrome keyboard shortcuts.