Difference between revisions of "Google Chrome"

Revision as of 11:59, 4 September 2008

Google Chrome was released on 2 September 2008.

Nice things about Chrome

• Firefox users who love their web tools plugins will be glad to know that Google Chrome has a built-in "Inspect element" feature which works the same way Firebug does - you can do editing on the fly, and track metrics and resources usage.
• Task Manager - Task Manager allows you to view the memory usage of each tab in every single browser that is currently open (that means the other browsers like Firefox, IE, Opera, etc) if you click "Stats for Nerds"; allowing you to target and kill the miscreant memory sucker that's slowing you down.
• Incognito window - fire up the incognito window with Ctrl-Shift-N and cookies will not be stored and url will not appear in your browsing history.
• Open last closed tab - have you closed your tab by mistake? Ctrl-Shift-T will bring it right back.
• Javascript Alert Stopper - When too many Javascript alerts appear from the same page, Chrome prompts you to stop all alerts. Discovered it when I triggered a lot of alerts while trying to test something; seems like a good preventive measure.
• Status Bar - The Status bar appears only when you are hovering over/loading a new page, and when you mouseover the status bar (when not maximised or when in fullscreen mode) it flips downwards to prevent blocking the screen content.
• Sad Face - Adorable sad face appears to placate you when things crash... (see picture at right, which appeared when flash plugin crashed)

Unusual points about Chrome

• Removal of HTML Title Bar - interesting that they reckon that the titles are not important and have relegated it to a mouseover thing only. in Chrome, most times you can only see the first three to five words of the title, so laconic and succinct titles might just be the future. but its true, anyway who reads the title these days when most times its not any indicator of content quality. but clearly, gone are the days when you were in primary school and expressed your adolescent angst by making a webpage with cute asterisks forming little flowery banners `"*-;,., iN tHe Titl3 b4rx,.;-*"` and used some silly cut-n-paste javascript to make it do a marquee at the top to piss off everyone. well i know i'm not missing those days.

Things which Chrome could do with

• Add-ons (but naturally this will take some time)

Shortcuts

Most of the usual shortcuts are there, like the Ctrl+N (new window) and the Ctrl+O (open file) yadda yadda and things like that. But these are the new and juicy ones for Chrome...

• Ctrl+E: New Search in current window (question mark will appear in address bar)
• Ctrl+Shift+N: Open a new window in incognito mode
• Ctrl+Shift+T: Reopen the last closed tabs (up to 10).
• Ctrl+H: View the History page
• Ctrl+J: View the Downloads page
• Shift+Escape: View the Task manager
• F6 or Ctrl+L or Alt+D: Highlight content in the web address area
• Type URL and press Alt+Enter: Open your web address in a new tab
• Alt+Home: View the Google Chrome homepage (with "The Page You Made")
• Ctrl+1-8: Shortcut to the chrome window in the order it appears on top window
• Ctrl+9: Shortcut to the last tab
• Ctrl+Tab: Cycle thru the chrome windows in order
• Ctrl+Shift+Tab: Cycle thru the chrome windows in the opposite order

How to see features

• about:chrome - Detailed info about your Chrome installation
• about:plugins - Detailed information about installed plugins
• about:memory
• about:stats
• about:network
• about:histograms
• about:cache
• about:plugins
• about:version
• view-cache:[URL]
• view-source:[URL]
• about:dns
• chrome-resource:/new-tab/ - the blank home page template
• chrome-resource:/favicon/ - even favicons look like this in the Matrix ;)
• chrome-resource:/thumb/[URL] - this one generates the page thumbnails for the empty tab page
• about:memory - nice memory stats
• about:crash - will display the default crash page banner
•  :% - crash your browser

about:internets - grabs C:/Windows/system32/sspipes.scr and plays it in browser. apparently if its not there/or if you are not using Windows XP then it says the tubes are clogged.

Questions

1. how do i enable/disable plugins? 2. does google analytics recognise chrome? or does it recognise it as safari?

javascript:alert(navigator.appName) -> returns Netscape (same as Firefox)

See Also

• Google Chrome (Download)
• Google Chrome Comic
• Firefox