Chrome

I downloaded and used Chrome V1.0 last year when its appearance just made the tech headline. It didn't impress me at that time, 'cause it started and ran quite slow. So I removed it on the same day.

Today I saw some one using it, and it looks cool and fine. I decided to give it a try. Now I decide that I am going to give up Firefox (which takes about 30 sec to startup on my slow-to-death Thinkpad), and of course IE (which I let it exist on my PC only because it sticks with Windows and some malicious websites only "suggest" using IE).

Interestingly enough, if you look into the default search engine list, someone must be unhappy. Apparently, Chrome doesn't live, and doesn't bing anything.

Useful tips.

Shortcuts

Create desktop and Start menu shortcuts to web apps such as Gmail - go to Gmail.com and then select Create application shortcuts... from the Page Control menu (in the top-right corner of your browser - it looks like a page with the corner folded over). Now choose where you want to place your shortcut. This works for other Google apps such as Calendar and Documents, and other services such as Windows Live Hotmail.

Private Browsing

Control + Shift + N opens an 'incognito' window - sites you view in this window won't appear in your history and cookies served by sites in this window will be deleted when the window is closed.

You can open a link in an incognito window by right-clicking the link and selecting Open link in incognito window.

Tabs

Alt + Home loads your Google Chrome home page, with thumbnails of your most visited sites shown in the active tabbed window.

Control + T opens a new tab. You can drag tabs around to change their order or drag a tab out of the window into its own window.

Control + Shift + T opens your most recently closed tab. Press the key combination again to open the tab closed before that one. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you've closed.

Jump to different open tabs using Control + 1, Control + 2,Control + 3, etc.Control + 9takes you to the last tab.

Control + Tab lets you cycle through your open tabs in order. Control + Shift + Tab cycles through your tabs in the opposite order.

Bookmark

Control +B hides the Google Chrome bookmarks bar. Press Control + B to bring it back again.

History

Right-click or hold down the back button and you'll get a drop-down list of sites to go back through. Show Full History, at the bottom of the list, opens a new tab with your full browser history.

Control + H is a faster way to bring up the History page.

You can delete history for chosen days by scrolling to the day you want to delete and clicking Delete history for this day on the right-hand side of the window.

Downloads

Control + J brings up your Downloads page.

To clear an item from your Downloads page, right-click an entry and select Remove.

Search

Press Control + K or Control + E to search from the address bar. Once pressed, you'll see a ? symbol appear in the address bar and you can simply enter your search query and hit Return.

Management

Right-click the top of the browser window and select Task manager to see how much memory different tabs and plug-ins are using. Highlight one and click End process to stop it running.

Shift + Escape is a quicker way to bring up the Google Chrome Task manager.

Monitor the resources used by a web page - right click inside the page, select Inspect element, switch to the Resources tab and reload the web page. You'll see a list of images, scripts and objects loaded from the web page and you can sort them by size or by loading time.

To see what plug-ins are installed, type about:plugins into the address window.

You can also type the following commands into the Google Chrome address window: about:stats, about:network, about:histograms, about:memory, about:cache, about:dns.

Type about:crash to see what a crashed tab looks like.

A three-second diversion: type about:internets. (Only works in Windows XP.)

Edit any web page - right-click a page and select Inspect element. Now edit the HTML source code and hit Return to view the changes.