Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers in the world, but it’s actually more feature rich than something simply designed for browsing the web.
Chrome is almost an independent operating system with its own applications and management structure. In fact, when it comes to Chromebooks, it literally acts like an operating system.
As such, you would be forgiven for missing out on some of the deeper, more advanced features the software has to offer. Here are five advanced Google Chrome features you wouldn’t know how you would have lived without.
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Being profiled is a good thing
Operating systems like Windows (and apps like Netflix) all have user profiles. That means multiple people can share the same device or app without having to share the same activity history, preferences, etc.
Chrome provides exactly the same functionality, but for some reason it seems most people don’t know about this or don’t understand the point. Sure, people are less likely to share devices, but that doesn’t mean Chrome profiles aren’t available other
use.
A great way to use profiles is to use one profile for work and another for personal use. This prevents your personal Internet habits from dirtying your work computer and allows you to have separate logins for services that may appear in both settings. For example, you might have Office 365 subscriptions for work and personal.
Accessing records couldn’t be easier. Just click the three-dot menu button at the top right of the Chrome Window and click Setting.
Now click Manage others.
In the Window that appears, click Add people.
Name your profile and click add and you’ll have a shiny new profile to use! You can switch profiles by clicking profile representative icon at the top right of the browser window and select the profile of your choice.
By the power of the address bar!
Most of us think of the address bar as where you put the URL, but Google’s address bar isn’t actually the address bar! Its proper name is Address bar and it’s a direct interface to the Google search engine.
You may have noticed that you can simply type search terms into the Address Bar and be taken straight to Google results, but many people don’t know that you can do things like do math calculations. , convert, look up weather, etc in the Address Bar without going to the actual search page to see the answer.
The address bar is much more than this, but it deserves an article of its own if you want to get really good at it.
Manage your password stress
Passwords, passwords are everywhere and we can’t remember any of them!
Yes, passwords are a painful fact of life. Weak passwords are easy to remember, strong passwords are hard to remember, and nobody really likes dealing with them that way. The best solution is to use a good password manager, but most people don’t bother and then end up with bad habits like sharing the same password across multiple services.
Google has come to the rescue and has now included a proper password manager in Chrome itself. You can easily view and look up the usernames and passwords that have been saved in Chrome, which is great if you need to recover a password you’ve forgotten.
The latest version of Chrome also now offers a strong password generator for you when you sign up or change your password on a website. These passwords are also synced to the cloud, so they follow you wherever you sign in to Chrome.
To access Chrome’s Password Manager, just click the menu button, click Setting and then click Password.
Here, you can search for your passwords, turn on or off the option to have Chrome offer to save your passwords, and see at a glance which sites you’ve saved your passwords on. You can also enable auto-login so you can log into a website without having to enter anything manually.
Moving multiple tabs will change your life
Tabbed browsing is an absolute revolution, but managing your tabs can be a real chore. Especially when you find yourself dragging them one by one into their appropriate window.
It turned out that there was never a need to move individual tabs to another Chrome window. If you simply keep Control while clicking tabs you can move them in groups. Yup, we also felt pretty silly when we found out.
Mute websites to save your condition
The site has a lot of rich media, but it can also be a fun soundtrack. Pop-up ads and other unwanted noise generators can be annoying and distracting. Worse yet, finding the culprit can be troublesome out of all the tabs you have open.
Chrome will help you in two ways here. First of all, web pages that are playing audio have a small speaker icon in the tab header. So you can quickly see who is putting something over the speaker. To quickly limit the noise, just right-click on the tab and click Mute the website.
Just remember that all open tabs on that site will now be muted, so if you really want to hear the audio you can reverse the process.
More than just a shiny name
List of users of Chrome features Candlestick know about is quite long and we are sure that we also do not know all of them. After you dig through the advanced commands for the Address Bar, the trip down the rabbit hole really gets stressful, but that’s a story for another day. Interesting!
