27 Incredibly Useful Things You
Didn’t Know Chrome Could Do
Give your internet experience a jolt of fresh energy with
these easily overlooked features, options, and shortcuts for Google’s browser.
These days, a browser is more than just a basic navigator for the
web. It’s effectively a second desktop—a gateway to countless apps, sites, and
services. And optimizing that environment can go a long way in increasing your
efficiency.
Google’s Chrome in particular is full of hidden shortcuts,
features, and power-user possibilities. Take the time to learn these tips, and
watch your productivity soar.
(Note that most of the tips here are specific to the desktop
versions of Chrome for Windows PCs and Macs and may not apply to the
browser’s mobile variants.)
LEARN SOME
HANDY HIDDEN SHORTCUTS
1. Want to open a
link into a new tab in the background, so it won’t interrupt what you’re
doing? Hold down Ctrl- or Cmd- and click it. To open a link in a whole new
window, meanwhile, use Shift instead. (This’ll work within most areas of
Chrome, by the way—including the History page and the dropdown history list
within the Back button, which we’ll get to in a bit.)
2. You probably know you can press the space bar to scroll down a
full page-length, but there’s another side to that shortcut: If you press Shift
and the space bar together, Chrome will do the opposite and scroll up by a full
page-length at a time.
3. If you ever close a tab by mistake, hit Ctrl- or Cmd-Shift-T.
Chrome will reopen your most
recently closed tab as if nothing had ever happened. (And you can
do it multiple times, too, if there’s more than one tab you’d like to recover.)
4. When you have a bunch of tabs open and want to hang onto the
entire session for later, hit Ctrl-Shift-D. That’ll let you save all your open tabs into a folder for
easy future access. To restore them, right-click the folder within your
bookmarks and select “Open all” or “Open all in new window.” Quickly save a session so you can get back to
it later.
5. Skip a step and get
info about any word or phrase in a page by highlighting it and then
right-clicking and selecting the “Search Google” option. You can also highlight
a word or phrase and drag it into Chrome’s address bar to achieve the same
result—or drag it into the area directly to the right of your final tab to
launch the search in a newtab instead of your current one. (Bonus
tip: Those same dragging behaviors can also be used to open links.)
6. Save a link with a
single click: Just click, hold down your mouse button, and drag the link
up into Chrome’s bookmarks bar. Drop it wherever you want, and it’ll be there
the next time you need it.
7. If you download a file and then want to move it somewhere
specific, click on its tile in the download bar that appears at the bottom of
the browser. You can then drag and
drop whatever you downloaded directly onto your desktop or into any folder.
8. You can also drag
and drop files from Chrome’s download bar directly into an online service—like
Google Drive, for instant uploading, or Gmail, for inserting the file as an
attachment in a new message.
9. Should you ever find Chrome mysteriously misbehaving, remember
this command: chrome://restart. Type it into Chrome’s address bar, and your
browser will restart itself and
restore all your tabs and windowsin a jiffy. You never know when it
might come in handy.
TEACH YOUR BROWSER
SOME NEW TRICKS
10. With 60 seconds of setup, you can give Chrome its own
quick-access scratchpad that’ll let you jot down thoughts right within the browser
11. Chrome’s custom search engine feature has tons of untapped productivity
potential. First, you can use it to create simple shortcuts to pages you visit often—anything from
favorite websites to internal Chrome pages or even the scratchpad described in
the previous tip. Just open up Chrome’s settings, click the line labeled
“Manage search engines,” then click the “Add” command next to the “Other search
engines” heading. Type the name of the page in the “Search engine” field, the
shortcut you want for it in the “Keyword” field, and the page’s full URL in the
“URL” field.
For instance, if you want to be able to pull up Chrome’s settings
simply by typing “cs” into your address bar, you could use “Chrome Settings” as
the search engine name, “cs” as the keyword, and chrome://settings as the URL.
To get to your new scratchpad quickly, you could use “Scratchpad” as the search
engine name, “s” as the keyword, and the full string of code from above as the
URL.
12. You can also use Chrome’s custom search engines feature
to create shortcuts for searching any
sites you want. The trick is to first find the full URL of the site’s
own search system—so if you wanted to do it for Fast Company, you’d
go to fastcompany.com, click the search icon in the upper-right corner of
the screen, then search for a word like “test.” The site will take you to https://www.fastcompany.com/search/test.
With that knowledge in tow, head back to Chrome’s “Manage search
engines” section and click the “Add” command. This time, type “Fast Company” in
as the search engine name, “fastcompany.com” as the keyword, and “https://www.fastcompany.com/search/%s”—with “%s”
taking the place of the actual query—as the URL.
Custom search engines take only a minute to set up and can save
you ample time in the future.
The next time you start typing “fastcompany.com” into Chrome’s
address bar, you’ll see instructions telling you to press Tab to search the
site. Set up similar systems for shopping sites, Wikipedia, dictionaries and
thesauruses, travel sites, or anything else you search semi-regularly, and
you’ll save valuable time by skipping steps and jumping straight to the info
you need.
13. Want to be able to search your email directly from Chrome’s address bar? Create a new
custom search engine with the name Gmail, whatever keyword you want (either “gmail.com”
or some shortened command), and “https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#search/%s”
as the URL.
14. Search Google
Drive from the address bar by creating a custom search engine with
“https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=%s” as the URL.
15. Speaking of Google Drive, if you move between multiple devices
during the day (and at this point, who doesn’t?), make your life a little
easier by telling Chrome to save
anything you download to a cloud-based folder. That way, you’ll be able
to find important files from your desktop, laptop, smartphone, or any other
device—regardless of where the download was actually performed.
First, you’ll have to install the desktop syncing program for your
cloud storage service of choice. Most services, including Google Drive, Dropbox,
and OneDrive, offer such utilities for all the
common operating systems. Once you set up the program, you’ll have a folder on
your local hard drive that’s always synced to a folder in your cloud storage.
Now, head into Chrome’s settings, click “Advanced,” and scroll
down to the section labeled “Downloads.” Click the “Change” command and find or
create an appropriate subfolder within your cloud-synced folder. Once you’ve
followed those steps on any desktop computers you want connected, anything you
download will be available everywhere you work—and always accessible via the
cloud service’s mobile apps as well.
TAKE ADVANTAGE
OF HIDDEN POWER TOOLS
16. Quiet annoying
sites once and for all by right-clicking their tabs (where the
title is displayed) and selecting “Mute site.” This recently added option will
prevent the site from playing any audio on your computer anytime you visit it.
17. Prefer to avoid
leaving a trail as you navigate the web? Open Chrome’s settings, click
“Advanced,” and then turn on the toggle next to “Send a ‘Do Not Track’ request
with your browsing traffic,” located within the “Privacy and security” section.
18. For additional privacy, take advantage of Chrome’s
out-of-the-way option to create
multiple user profiles and allow guest access to your browser. That’ll
let someone else use Chrome on your computer without gaining access to all of
your personal data (and without gunking up your history with whatever sites
they visit). Look for the line labeled “Manage other people” in Chrome’s
settings to get started.
19. Chrome’s History page—accessible by hitting Ctrl- or Cmd-H or
by typing chrome://history into your address bar—has a powerful yet easily
overlooked feature: an always-synced list of tabs you have open in Chrome on
other devices. Surf over there anytime you want to find what you were last viewing on your phone, your tablet, or another
computer.
20. The Back button in Chrome’s upper-left corner does more than
you might think. Click it and hold your mouse’s button down, and you’ll get a pop-up history of recent pages viewed
within your current tab.
Hidden within Chrome’s Back button is a tab-specific (and fully
interactive) history list.
21. Chrome can strip
all formatting from copied text as you paste it—eliminating links,
fonts, colors, and anything else you might not want to carry over. Once you’ve
copied some text, hit Ctrl- or Cmd-Shift-V to give it a whirl.
22. Trying to look at a website that’s down—or need to step back in time and see how a particular
page looked a while ago? Type cache:website.com into Chrome’s
address bar, replacing website.comwith whatever URL you want.
23. Let Chrome act as
your file explorer: Drag and drop any image, video, or audio file into
the browser to open it right then and there—and on Windows, try typing C:\ into
Chrome’s address bar to browse your hard drive’s contents.
ENHANCE YOUR
ENVIRONMENT AND ELIMINATE ANNOYANCES
24. Sick of getting those pop-ups asking if some site can send
notifications through your browser? Turn off site notifications entirelyby opening Chrome’s settings,
clicking “Advanced,” then clicking the line labeled “Content settings.” Next,
find and click the line for “Notifications” and turn the toggle at the top of
the page off.
25. The next time you come across a text form on a website, give
yourself a little space to think: Look for the two diagonal lines in the box’s
lower-right corner. Click that area and drag downward, and ta-da: You can resize the text box to make it as large as
you’d like.
Dragging down on the diagonal lines in a form’s lower-right corner
lets you expand the box so you can actually see everything you’ve typed.
26. Chrome extensions can be incredibly useful, but they can also
create a lot of clutter in your browser’s upper-right corner. Hide the extension icons you don’t need to
see by right-clicking them and selecting “Hide in Chrome menu” from
the options that appear. You can also just hover your mouse over the far right
side of the address bar until you see a double-sided arrow appear and then drag
the address bar toward the right to extend it and hide multiple extension icons
at once.
And if you ever need to get to an out-of-sight extension icon,
just open the main Chrome menu (the three-dot icon to the right of the
extensions). You’ll see all of the icons there.
27. While we’re talking about extensions, did you know you
can create custom keyboard
shortcuts for opening extensions on demand?Some extensions even allow
you to create shortcuts for specific commands. Type
chrome://extensions/shortcuts into your browser’s address bar to set up your
own.
BY JR
RAPHAEL
https://www.fastcompany.com/40557798/27-incredibly-useful-things-you-didnt-know-chrome-could-do?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=8&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=12152018
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