cool Google Chrome tips 'n' tricks

My guess is most people aren't using Google's new Chrome Web browser as their primary browser just yet. Google still has a long way to go with the browser adding features and fixing problems. Nevertheless, I've collected what I think are some of the most useful tips and the most interesting tweaks for the Chrome browser.

Bookmark this page or print them out if you like for future reference (because, as we all know, we can never find what we're looking for when we actually want them!!)

ONE: Surprisingly Handy Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Chrome offers some unique shortcuts that go beyond the typical CTRL + T for opening new browser tabs. Here is a list to all of Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts.

Ctrl+N	Open a new window
Ctrl+T	Open a new tab
Ctrl+Shift+N	Open a new window in incognito mode
Ctrl+O, then select file	Open a file from your computer in Google Chrome
Press Ctrl, and click a link	Open link in a new tab
Press Shift, and click a link	Open link in a new window
Alt+F4	Close current window
Ctrl+Shift+T	Reopen the last tab you've closed. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you've closed.
Drag link to tab	Open link in specified tab
Drag link to space between tabs	Open link in a new tab in the specified position on the tab strip
Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8	Switch to the tab at the specified position number. The number you press represents the position of the tab on the tab strip.
Ctrl+9	Switch to the last tab
Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PgDown	Switch to the next tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab or Ctrl+PgUp	Switch to the previous tab
Ctrl+W or Ctrl+F4	Close current tab or pop-up
Alt+Home	Open your homepage

Address bar shortcuts

Do one of the following actions in the address bar:

Type a search term	Perform a search using your default search engine
Type the part of the web address that's between 'www.' and '.com', then press Ctrl+Enter	Add www.and .com to your input in the address bar and open the web address
Type a search engine keyword or URL, press Tab, then type a search term	Perform a search using the search engine associated with the keyword or the URL. Google Chrome prompts you to press Tab if it recognizes the search engine you're trying to use.
F6 or Ctrl+L or Alt+D	Highlight content in the web address area
Type a web address, then press Alt+Enter	Open your web address in a new tab

Shortcuts to open Google Chrome features

Ctrl+B	Toggle bookmarks bar on and off
Ctrl+H	View the History page
Ctrl+J	View the Downloads page
Shift+Escape	View the Task manager
Shift+Alt+T	Set focus on the toolbar. Use right and left arrows on the keyboard to navigate to different buttons on the toolbar.

Webpage shortcuts

Ctrl+P	Print your current page
Ctrl+S	Save your current page
F5	Reload current page
Esc	Stop page loading
Ctrl+F5 or Shift+F5	Reload current page, ignoring cached content
Press Alt, and click a link	Download link
Ctrl+F	Open find-in-page box
Ctrl+G or F3	Find next match for your input in the find-in-page box
Ctrl+Shift+G or Shift+F3	Find previous match for your input in the find-in-page box
Ctrl+U	View source
Drag link to bookmarks bar	Bookmark the link
Ctrl+D	Bookmark your current webpage
Ctrl++	Make text larger
Ctrl+-	Make text smaller
Ctrl+0	Return to normal text size

Text shortcuts

Highlight content, then press Ctrl+C	Copy content to the clipboard
Place your cursor in a text field, then press Ctrl+V or Shift+Insert	Paste current content from the clipboard
Place your cursor in a text field, then press Ctrl+Shift+V	Paste current content from the clipboard without formatting
Highlight content in a text field, then press Ctrl+X or Shift+Delete	Delete the content and copy it to the clipboard

Backspace, or press Alt and the left arrow together	Go to the previous page in your browsing history for the tab
Shift+Backspace, or press Alt and the right arrow together	Go to the next page in your browsing history for the tab
Ctrl+K or Ctrl+E	Places a '?' in the address bar. Type a search term after the '?' to perform a search using your default search engine.
Place your cursor in the address bar, then press Ctrl and the left arrow together	Jump to the previous word in the address bar
Place your cursor in the address bar, then press Ctrl and the right arrow together	Jump to the next word in the address bar
Place your cursor in the address bar, then press Ctrl+Backspace	Delete the previous word in the address bar
Space bar	Scroll down the web page
Home	Go to the top of the page
End	Go to the bottom of the page

Here three that I find unique, when compared to those offered by Firefox and IE.

CTRL + SHIFT + N automatically opens up a Chrome 'incognito' window which allows you to surf on a PC without leaving behind any digital footprints.

SHIFT + Escape allows for fast access to Chrome?s Task Manager utility that allows you to nix browser processes that have gone awry.

CTRL + SHIFT + T will open recently closed browser tabs.


TWO: Custom Searches

When you want to run a search directly from Google's address bar (a.k.a. Omnibox) just type a question mark (?) followed by a keyword. The default search engine is Google. To change the default search engine to anything you want go right-click inside the address bar and select "Edit search engines." You can choose from a predefined list, or create your own.

Here is how to create your own shortcut to search the site of your choice directly from Google Chrome's Omnibox.


1) Right-click inside address bar and select "Edit search engines."
2) With that dialogue box remaining open, now go to a website you would like to create a custom search for. For the sake of example try ask.com
3) Once you visit the site now look at your "Search Engines" configuration window and you'll notice under the "Other search engines" field ask.com has been added.
4) Next you'll want to change the "Keyword" to something short and easy to remember such as DIC.

Now when you want to look up a word at ask.com all you have to do is type in Chrome's Omnibox "ASK" proceeded by the word you want to look up.



THREE: Enable Firefox to Run More Like Chrome

This tip and tweak isn't absolutely Chrome-centric, rather Chrome related. For those who like the innovative new features Chrome offers, but aren't happy with some of the bugs, security, and privacy issues you can have your cake and eat it too.

LifeHacker offers a list of ways to configure Firefox to embody some of Chromes coolest new features. For example LifeHacker offers ways to surf with Firefox incognito-style, highlight domains in your address bar, and convert Websites into applications.


FOUR: Larger Comment Boxes

Comment boxes on Web sites soliciting feedback can sometimes be way too small. With Chrome you simply click on the corner of any Web-based comment field and stretch it out as large as you like.


FIVE: Help me Home, Please

Google Chrome's minimalist approach to design that leaves the interface clutter-free can be appreciated. But without a Home button Chrome feels a bit like a house with no front door. To regain the Home button on your browser simply go to the little wrench icon, select the Google Chrome Options, click on the Basics tab, and check the "Show Home button on the Toolbar" box.


SIX: Fun With Tabs

Browser tabs are an incredibly useful feature in browsers today. Google has spent some time and made them even more useful by allowing more tab flexibility than is currently possible with IE or Firefox. Chrome allows you to peel browser tabs off a browser so they can become their own browser window. Chrome also allows you to take two separate Chrome browsers and drag them together creating one window with two tabs.



SEVEN: A Little More Privacy Please

As privacy issues continue to swirl around Google new concerns have been raised regarding Google's Chrome browser. According to reports, Google's auto-suggest (featured in the Chrome browser Omnibar) allows Google to know everything you type into it ? even if you don't hit enter. Ina Fried from CNET suggests you disable the feature.

To disable the auto-suggest feature right-click inside the Omnibar and un-check the "Use a suggestion service to help complete searches."


EIGHT: Go Incognito on the Fly

Not sure what awaits you when you contemplate clicking on that link? If you want to make sure your Web tracks are covered just right-click the link and select "Open link in incognito window."


NINE: No Google Toolbar for Google Chrome, No Problemo

Former PC World Editor in Chief, Harry McCracken, has been bemoaning the ironic fact Google Chrome doesn't support the handy Google Toolbar on his Technologizer Web site. The Google Toolbar, available for IE and Firefox, bring much versatility to the browser including a shortcut to Gmail, access to online Google Bookmarks, a spell checker, and the ability to send URL links via e-mail in just a few clicks.

Mr. McCracken explains he has found a way to create an approximation to the Google Toolbar by tweaking Google Chrome with a technique he calls "Project Fakebar." For those with idle time, head on over to the Technologizer site and find out how to put a Fakebar on your Chrome Browser.


TEN: Everyone Loves an Easter Egg

Type "about:internets" (without the quotes of-course) into the address bar and you'll see a tribute to United States Senator Ted Stevens' take on the Internet. (This apparently only works in Windows XP)


MORE About: page Easter eggs

You may already know about Google Chrome's humorous about:internets Easter egg, but here is a list of Chrome's several special "about: pages" that reveal all sorts of interesting information about what's going on behind the scenes. Here's the full list:

* about:memory
* about:stats
* about:network
* about:internets
* about:histograms
* about:dns
* about:cache
* about:crash
* about:plugins
* about:version

you can also go to two special pages on a per-site basis. view-cache:[URL] shows you some under-the-hood cache details, and view-source:[URL] shows you the page's markup. (Though you can view source by just right-clicking on a page and choosing, well... "View page source.")

I hope you found these tips,tweaks and tricks useful... leave me your feedback, as always, by using the link below, you can be paid for them (brings meaning to the term "penny for your thoughts" right?)

Until next time........

The browser wars are back!

At the turn of the century, Microsoft brutally vanquished Netscape in the browser wars. For a while, that victory appeared to be permanent. The battle had been a pretty ugly one: A federal court found that Microsoft illegally used its Windows monopoly to expand Internet Explorer's market share; Netscape never recovered from its loss. For most computer users, though, the browser wars were sublime: The Web browser was "invented" in 1992, and within five years, with hundreds of developers at both Microsoft and Netscape pumping out code, browsers became fast, stable, and capable of some very neat tricks.

These days, Web designers boast about all they can do with AJAX, the set of technologies that allow Web sites to emulate desktop-app behavior like drag-and-drop (ie Google Maps). AJAX runs on code that was created by Microsoft and Netscape as competitive weapons during the browser wars. Yes, today's glorious Web was made possible by yesterday's bruising business confrontation. All of us should rejoice, then, at the dawn of Browser War II.

Google has released a Web browser called Chrome. This new piece of software enters a crowded field of browsers looking for your love. Microsoft with its final revision of Internet Explorer 8,.(Both Chrome and IE 8 run only on Windows, though Google says it's creating versions for other platforms.) In June, Mozilla put out Version 3 of its popular open-source, cross-platform Firefox browser, in Version 3.1. The Norwegian software company Opera also released its latest eponymous, innovative, cult-hit browser. And Apple is now working on the next version of Safari for Mac and Windows.

All this competition is great news, because the world desperately needs a better Web browser. For at least the past four or five years, Firefox has been the gold standard among techies; I've been using it as my primary browser for at least that long. I loved it, I appreciated its smart, clean user interface, its tabs (although all browsers use tabs now, at the time when I moved to Firefox, this was the only browser to do so) and keyboard shortcuts, and most of all—Firefox's killer feature—its ability to run a wide range of useful third-party add-ons. But Firefox is hobbled by a couple of major flaws. It hogs system resources: Use it for a while, and it eats up huge chunks of your computer's memory, eventually slowing browsing to a near snail pace. Firefox is also prone to crashing: Load up an errant Web page, and you risk bringing the program to a halt. (This problem makes session-recovery add-ons like Tab Mix Plus essential.)

Admittedly, I'm not an ordinary Web user—I use my browser as a research tool, mail app, calendar, media player, and a tabbed to-do list. I live and breath the internet, I can't be without it... At any point during the day, I've got three or four browser windows open, each with 10 to 15 Web pages running in tabs (at least). I understand that this bespeaks a kind of insanity, but with Web sites growing ever more useful and Web users growing ever more addicted, it's the sort of insanity that afflicts an increasing number people.

The wonderful thing about Google's new browser, is that it's been built with the singular purpose of handling a hefty workload. While I'm not yet ready to switch to Chrome as my permanent browser—it's got some odd user interface quirks, lacks a few useful features, and doesn't have Firefox's hordes of plug-ins—I've found it to be impressively fast and stable. So far, it's run everything that I've thrown it's way without bringing my computer to a halt. For that alone, I really think that Google's on to something.

Just as Windows runs Photoshop and iTunes at the same time without letting each bother the other, or getting in each others way, Chrome lets its processes do different tasks in parallel. If one Chrome tab is busy loading Google Reader, another Chrome tab won't be crimped while refreshing the CNNSI.com website. Best of all, if one process crashes, your full browser session remains intact. I've inadvertently learned many different ways to make Firefox crash; none of these tricks worked on Chrome. The best I could do was crash a single process—this brought down an individual tab, but Chrome as a whole, kept running.

There are several more under-the-hood improvements. Google claims that Chrome beats other browsers at "garbage collection"— the computer-science term for how a program gets rid of memory it no longer needs. Better garbage collection significantly reduces how much of your computer's resources an application consumes. Google also wrote its own JavaScript virtual machine—the engine that runs all the fancy AJAX code that powers complex new Web apps—that it claims is faster and more stable than other browsers' scripting engines. Though I found Chrome speedy and less demanding on my system's resources than Firefox 3.0, its advantage isn't unsurpassable—Lifehacker's tests give the memory and speed edge to Firefox 3.1.

You aren't likely to notice Chrome's tech improvements when you load it up for the first time. What you'll see is a clean, minimalistic app, one missing several features that you're used to in other browsers. For example, Chrome presents no good way to manage bookmarks. Still, there are some innovative features. Instead of an address bar and a search box, Chrome uses only one input bar in which you're free to type either something like "ebay.com" or "policies of Barrack Obama" Chrome is smart enough to figure out when to take you to a Web page and when to perform a Web search. It also lists other recently visited sites containing ebay, obama, or other like terms.

I found some of Google's other user-interface tweaks a little more annoying than useful. Chrome places its row of tabs in the title bar, an area that in most apps isn't used for anything other than displaying the name of the program. This saves space on your screen, but it also eradicates one of the main ways people have grown accustomed to using tabs in browsers—you can't double-click the tab bar to open a new tab, like you can on every other multi-tab browser. (Double-clicking the bar in Chrome resizes the window.)

This is a petty nitpick, obviously. Chrome is very much a work in progress, a beta program that I expect will improve dramatically in the months to come. It shares two advantages with Firefox: Chrome is open-source, meaning outside developers are free to extend and improve it. And Chrome includes a plug-in infrastructure that lets people create add-ons. Because it's new, neither of these features is very important just yet. But if Chrome catches on, developers will likely build these and other great programs for it; theoretically, people could even take the best bits of Firefox and Chrome and build another single awesome browser.

For Google, Microsoft, and Apple, the browser fight is a means to other ends. Microsoft, which holds more than three-quarters of the browser market, looks at the Web as an extension of its operating system. As more of our programs move online, Microsoft fears that we might have little reason to stick to Windows; it sees control of the browser as a way to control the future of software development. Google seems to want to be in the browser business to fight Microsoft. The company's revenue comes entirely from the Web, so it's got to be wary that most of its customers come through software created by its main rival. (Google substantially underwrites both Firefox and Opera, which both feature Google's search engine as the default.) Apple, meanwhile, needs a browser to beef up its own platform—not only on the Mac but also on its phones and iPods.

Sure, these aims aren't entirely noble. But who cares? As the giants duke it out to come up with the best product, they'll copy and improve upon each other's innovations, bringing new features to all browsers. Chrome's immunity to crashing, for instance, is sure to push both Mozilla and Microsoft to improve their browsers' stability. Perhaps soon you'll be able to load up any browser you like and watch two dozen YouTube videos at once without fearing a crash—just like the Web was always meant to be used.

The gloves appear to be off!

Until next time........