On the surface Google Chrome looks like any other browser, but it much more functionality under the hood than almost any other browser in the market today. By tweaking the settings to your taste, you can pretty much customize it to work exactly how you want. It also has amazing hidden features that will greatly enhance your browser experience.
The best part is that you don’t need to be a tech wizard to to do it. Today we’ll look at some tricks so useful, you’ll wonder how you lived without them so far!
1. Mute those annoying tabs
We all have visited a website which has a built in video ad player that starts playing automatically, without you having to click on it. Most people simply mute the volume of their system till they are done browsing that particular site.
Chrome however, provides for a better option – it allows you to mute only that particular tab. While this functionality has been built into chrome for a while, it is not enabled by default.
To enable it, paste the following text into the address bar and press enter:
chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting
Doing this will take you deep under the hood, but do not be overwhelmed, it will automatically take you to the option you are supposed to enable. Simply click enable and restart your browser. Now you can mute tabs when you want.
Anytime you are visiting a site that has sound originating from it, a speaker icon will appear in that tab’s title. Clicking on the speaker icon will toggle mute/unmute.
2. The easiest way to select a block of text
One of the most common tasks many of us perform while browsing is selecting a word, a paragraph or a large chunk of text from a web page. The way most of us do it is to select the text with the mouse. This however, can be cumbersome when the text is rather large or embedded within a larger body of work.
There is a quick trick that you can use to make selecting text a piece of cake. For starters, to select a word, just double-click it. No need to drag the mouse to select it.
If you triple-click anywhere within a paragraph, it will select the whole thing. Again, no need to drag with the mouse- just triple-click anywhere within the body of the paragraph.
But what if you wanted to select a part of the paragraph? For e.g. starting from line 3 till the end of the paragraph. Simple. Click once where you want the selection to begin. Then, shift click where you want the selection to end and voila! The selected portion will be highlighted instantly.
You’ll be surprised how this one little trick will save you loads of time.
We aren’t done with with the Chrome tricks. Tomorrow we’ll look at two more handy tricks to change your Chrome experience.
~ Yogesh
Love it, and so simple thank you