Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers out there and the company has been actively adding more and more features to make sure it keeps the lead in the market. It has recently added several new features, including the much-anticipated Dark Mode, improved tab management among others.
Chrome browser has so many features that sometimes a few interesting ones remain unnoticed. So, here is a list of Google Chrome features that you might not have heard about or used.
Gesture Navigations
Google introduced gestures support for Chrome so that users can navigate within the browser easily. Using this feature, you can swipe inward from the left-hand side of the display to go back and inward from the right to go forward.
You can activate gestures navigation in Google Chrome by typing chrome://flags/#overscroll-history-navigation into the URL bar and make sure the setting is switched on. Once you enable this feature, you will ned to restart Chrome for setting to kick in.
Omnibox
The address bar or the URL bar in Google Chrome is actually the Omnibox which is a direct interface to the Google search engine. It just doesn’t take the user straight to the Google results page but can also offer several types of results directly such as mathematical calculations and weather updates and that too without going to the actual search page.
Dark Mode
The year of 2019 seems to be the year of Dark Mode. Most of the popular apps have now added a dark theme to the user experience better during night time. Google also added Dark Mode to Chrome earlier this year which can also help increase battery life for OLED users.
To enable this, just go to Settings > Appearance and adjust the theme to “Material Incognito Dark Theme”. This is not just limited to Chrome mobile app as the company has made the dark mode available on macOS as well as Windows 10.
Muting Websites
While many websites have been updated to make sure that audio or video doesn’t start automatically but there are several websites out there, including some big names, which are offenders of this annoying feature. To get rid of this, Chrome has a little speaker icon in the tab title for sites that play audio. You can check which sites create noise among multiple tabs and right-click the tab and mute it.
Multiple Profiles or Kids Profile
Google Chrome also allows users to create multiple user profiles. This can be used to make your kids stop from accessing pages that you don’t want them to. It can be used to supervise their online activity. With the kids profile, user can monitor and control the activity.
To create a profile for the kid, the parent first has to create a new profile. To do so, go to Settings > People > Manage other people. From there, the user to select the option that says Add person. Now, check the box that says “Control and view the web pages that shi person visit from [the parent’s log-on account].” After that, click the option that says Add.
After this, you’ll receive an email from Google that will lead you to the supervised Chrome user’s page. You will then gain the ability to not only block specific sites but also keep a lock on SafeSearch and also view that Chrome user’s web activities.
