Google Chrome's Top 10 Hidden Features

From the iPad interface to quick calculations, Daniel Johnson brings you 10 of Google Chrome's best hidden features

1) Built-in task manager

Everyone knows Ctrl+Alt+Delete brings up Windows task manager. But did you know Google Chrome has its own?

Chrome treats each tab as a separate process so if just one of them starts causing a problem, instead of closing the entire browser, you can just kill the offending tab.

You can access it through Tools > Task Manager or by pressing Shift+Esc.

2) Paste and go/paste and search

Google Chrome has a useful shortcut if you want to copy a URL from another browser which you want to look at in Chrome, or if you want to search a piece of text, for example from a word document.

Instead of doing Ctfl+V and Enter in the address bar, instead you can just right click in the URL bar and choose “Paste and go”, or “Paste and search”, saving you valuable seconds.

3) Pin tab

The Pin tab feature is ideal for those tabs which you never close when browsing, such as email, or Twitter.

The tab you select will be locked to the extreme left, and will be converted to a smaller favicon.

4) iPad interface

Intrigued as to how your favourite sites look on iPad? Well you don’t need an iPad to find out.

Right click on the chrome shortcut on your desktop and select properties. Go to the “Shortcut” tab, and in the “Target” field you will find this text written (where “username” is your windows username): “C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”

Replace the text with the text below, but make sure you have your own windows username after C: \Users\…

“C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″

Press OK, and now when you open your Chrome browser for sites which have iPad versions such as Gmail, Twitter and YouTube, it will look as it does on an iPad.

A useful tool if you are considering buying an iPad and want to know what browsing will look like.

5) About:memory

This feature is one of the geekier ones, but Chrome’s “About memory” page – which can be accessed by typing “about:memory” into the address bar – gives details on how different processes in the browser are consuming memory.

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