5 Google Browser Tips

Google Chrome – or its Open Source counterpart Chromium – is a relatively new web browser developed by Google. It combines several interesting features and ideas that the other Internet browsers do not offer. This article will examine five interesting features of the Google browser. Some of them can be added to other web browsers – especially Mozilla Firefox – with add-ons while others are unique at the moment. It usually does not take long however before a popular feature gets implemented in other web browsers as well.

1. Resources Pane

Webmasters that use Firefox usually have the Firebug add-on installed which gives them access to information about a website’s source code but also about the elements on a page including their load time. Google Chrome provides these information out of the box. A simple right-click on a fully loaded website and the selection of Inspect Element will open the site inspector. The tab Resources displays the loading time and size of all elements on that specific webpage. Resources are further divided into categories like scripts, images or documents. The total loading time and transfer size is shown that is also divided by the categories. This gives an immediate overview over the elements that slow down the page loading time the most.

2. Resizing Text areas

Text areas on websites are usually placed to give visitors the means to interact with the website or its owner. Contact and comment forms make use of text areas which allow the user to enter text into them. Some websites implement rather small text boxes which makes it unnecessary difficulty to enter a comment or message. Google Chrome offers a feature to resize text areas on websites by simply clicking in the right lower corner and dragging the text are to a larger size.

3. The Task Manager

The task manager of the Google browser provides information about the memory, cpu and network usage of every open tab, the browser engine itself and plugins that have been loaded. The overview is interesting as it gives the user information about high resource sources directly in the web browser. Plugins with a high resource usage can be identified and uninstalled from the web browser or computer system. Even more interesting is the option to kill one of the web browser’s tabs from the task manager window. The tabs work independently from each other which makes it safe to delete tabs.

4. Using Incognito Mode to log into the same service twice with different accounts

Incognito Mode is already available in other web browsers. Those that do not have implemented it already have announced to (likely) add it into one of the future builds. While its primary focus is privacy it can be used to log into the same service with a different account at the same time. This is possible because the active cookies and information do not carry over when starting incognito mode. It is therefor possible to log into services like Gmail twice. First normally and then the second time by starting Incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N) and logging into the service again.

5. Browser History

The shortcut [Ctrl H] will open the browser history in Google Chrome. The history is sorted by date. Websites are listed with their favicon and title on the main page. The search form can be used to find terms in the history. These result terms look a bit different. Google Chrome displays dates, titles, descriptions and thumbnails while Chromium displays the same information but the thumbnails.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Saturday May 2, 2009 -
Tags:chromium, Google, google browser, google chrome, google chrome tips, internet browser, web browser

Responses so far:

1. Bisnis247 says:

   May 3, 2009 at 11:56 am

   Thanks for your information.

   Reply