Chrome tips

The Facebook app is well-known for its hefty battery consumption. The app alone could steal 10-20% battery in the background, leading to a significantly less battery life. However, you can deal with this problem pretty easily by making use of Chrome and its features. The first thing? Just throw-out the Facebook application from your device by uninstalling it. Next, use tip #5 to pin your Facebook profile/timeline to your phone’s homescreen. This will allow you to access Facebook directly from the homescreen, just like you would have opened the app. Facebook integrates well with Chrome and supports push notifications, just like you would have them from the app. This gives us one last reason not to use the official app. The setting, however, should be enabled by opening Facebook mobile site on the device you want notifications on. Then go to Account Settings > Notifications > Mobile. Turn On the feature and you will be prompted to grant permission, just ALLOW it. This way, you will still be having undisturbed access to Facebook and at the same time, would also save some decent amount of battery.

Often times when we are reading something on the internet, we find words and phrases that simply hop over our head. Most of us don’t even bother about them and move on. While it saves the time and a few taps; it does take a toll on our knowledge (I don’t blame you, it’s a common thing that everyone does, even me). Google knows its users very well and spares you the struggle to open a new tab and search for a single word or phrase. So now when you come across something while reading, just long-press the word and highlight it. The clipboard options will pop-up instantly and then you can hit WEB SEARCH. What this will do is, open a partial search box within the same tab. You can slide up this search window, read all you want, and close it to reappear where you left. By default, the feature comes enabled in Chrome. However, if it is disabled for you, go to Chrome Settings > Privacy > Touch to Search and enable it.

Nothing’s better than accessing your frequently visited and favorite websites directly from the homescreen. You wouldn’t need to open the browser every time and enter the web address. Saving even a bit of time could be productive and why not do it, when things are coming right at your tips. To add, you first need to open the website or a specific webpage on Chrome. Then tap on the 3-dot overflow button on the top-right and select Add to home screen. Choose the name for your shortcut and you’re good to go!

Your favorite Android browser has a lot of hidden features, but these are experimental and may also be buggy at times. One such feature is Reader Mode. Suppose you visit a web page that is resource-heavy and consists of advertisements that may cut-in while you are reading, thus making the reading experience a little difficult. Chrome lets you deal with such situations easily by enabling Reader Mode, which will slice down the web page and make your reading distraction-free. Go to the Chrome address bar and enter chrome://flags. You will have to scroll down and find Reader Mode triggering. You can also use the “Find in page” feature of Chrome to search for it. Now change the settings from Default to Always. You will be prompted to relaunch Chrome, so tap on the RELAUNCH NOW button and Chrome will restart with the feature enabled. Not all web pages comply with reader mode, but if a page you visit supports it, you will see a Make page mobile-friendly button. Just hit and you are ready to read.

Instead of making use of third-party data saving applications and cluttering your “Installed Apps” screen, you can simply make use of Chrome’s in-built data saving feature. Data saver allows you to load webpages faster on slow connections by effectively reducing the size of the web page, and thus sparing you some amount of data. To enable, go to Chrome Settings > Data Saver and turn on the feature. When the feature is switched on, going to Settings > Data Saver will display the amount of data saved and also the actual amount that would have been used. Observing the screenshot above, you can easily depict that the data saved is approximately 100MB.

With Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google Chrome tabs were merged with apps in the multitasking screen. So for every tab you open, it will display along with other recent apps. This, instead of making things easy, probably made a mess, would you agree? And that’s why it was deferred from further updates. While the feature is enabled by-default, it is still optional and can be disabled pretty easily. Just go to Chrome Settings > Merge tabs and apps and switch them off. Switching between tabs on Chrome is even easier. You can either swipe across the address bar back and forth, to quickly access opened apps. Indeed it is much faster than manually switch using the tab overview option. Or, if you have got a handful of tabs opened simultaneously, then simply swipe down from the address bar and you can access the tab overview. Quickly choose your tab and on you go.

Similar to Windows, Chrome also has a task manager that shows currently opened processes and their impact. To open the task manager press Shift+Esc keys while Chrome is open. Here you can see the process of each tab that is open and how they are using CPU, memory, and network resources. Although it offers a ton of information for developers, but regular users can also use it for many purposes. For example, you can use it to see if any tab is putting pressure on your CPU power consistently and close that tab (same goes for memory). You can also see how many times a website in a tab is connecting with your network.

This trick isn’t very useful for mainstream users (unless you want to fake a crash), but many developers actually use it to check how their extension or web app will behave in a crash. You can make both a single tab or the whole Chrome browser crash. However, before trying it, I will recommend you to save your data in case Chrome is unable to recover after the crash. Type chrome://crash in the address bar to make the current tab crash. If you want the whole browser to crash, then enter about:inducebrowsercrashforrealz in the address bar.