Random Thoughts

Here are some not-so-obvious things you can do in Google Chrome, the minimalistic browser launched on Tuesday.

1. Show the list of recently visited pages from the current tab: right-click on the "Back" button. This also works for the "Forward" button.


2. Undo closing a tab: press Ctrl+Shift+T or open a new tab and check the "Recently closed tabs" section.

3. Focus on the default search option in the address bar: type ? before entering your query.

4. Perform simple calculations and unit conversions using Google Calculator by simply typing the expression in Google Chrome's address bar (or "omnibox"). To copy the answer, select the suggestion.


5. If you need more space in a textarea, resize it by dragging the lower right corner.


6. 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.


7. Detach a tab and open it in a new window - just drag the tab outside the active window. You can also add it back to the original window using drag and drop.


8. After downloading a file, you can copy it to the desktop or to any other folder by using drag and drop directly from Google Chrome.


9. If the search engine of a site supports OpenSearch, you can add it to Google Chrome's search box by simply visiting the site and performing a search. The domain name automatically becomes a keyword and you should only type the first letters from the URL until you see "press Tab to search example.com". Then press Tab and type your query.


You can also manually add search engines, by right-clicking on the address bar and selecting "Edit search engines". Here's one example, where you can see that you need to find the URL for the search results page and replace the query with %s:

Name - Wikipedia
Keyword - wiki (that's what you need to type in the address bar)
URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

You can also use the keywords for other kinds of services: for translating web pages, for bookmarking pages online or simply as aliases for web pages (omit "%s" from the URL).

Name - Google Translate (English)
Keyword - trans
URL - http://translate.google.com/translate?u=%s

10. Do you want Google Chrome without Google's branding and with an open source license (BSD license)? Check Chromium, the open source project created for Google Chrome. You can install the latest snapshots for Windows or download the code and build it in Windows, Mac, Linux.

To install Chromium in Windows, go to the most recent directory from this page (it should be at the top) and download mini_installer.exe. Note that these snapshots could be less stable than the version available at google.com/chrome and you may need to manually update Chromium.