Sunday Tips: Google Chrome

The beta tag is gone, the use of extensions seems to be imminent, and Google Chrome looks poised to become the next big thing on the Web-browser market. I’ve been using it for a while, and grow to like it more and more every time I discover something new and excellent that Chrome can do to make my browsing even better.

And there sure are a lot of things that fall into that category. Chrome does neat things with your history, your searching, your most visited pages, and a number of other parts of the browsing experience.

Here’s a few tips to get the most out of Google Chrome:

One Bar, Many Functions

The address bar in Google Chrome does far more than show you the webpage you’re on. Type in a search query, press Enter, and Chrome automatically searches Google for you. Type in the beginnings of a page you’ve been to before, and Chrome will give you a list of matching URLs, that you can click on to get back to your page. You can even search your history and get search recommendations by typing into the address bar. It’s fast, easy, and it just works. This bar is the biggest reason I’m using Chrome, and it makes browsing incredibly faster.

Keyboard Love

Google Chrome offers a bunch of great keyboard shortcuts to make browsing even fast. Control+T opens a new tab, Control+W closes the current one. Control+Shift+T opens the last closed tab (a shortcut I use constantly), Control+Tab cycles through your open tabs, and Control+H opens your history in a tab. And those are just the shortcuts for your tabs! Fore more keyboard-y goodness, check out Google’s list of Chrome Shortcuts.

Mousing Around

Don’t like the keyboard? You won’t have to use it much with Chrome. There are a couple of great, time-saving mouse shortcuts that Chrome did a great job with. A favorite is the “paste and go” feature. If you’ve got a URL on your clipboard, right-click in the Chrome address bar. Click “paste and go” and the page will automatically be loaded for you, without having to press Enter. It’s small, but it’s useful. Also, you can drag the corner of any text box in Chrome to make it better sized for your writing. There are other great ways to use your mouse, but those are the two that I find myself using on a daily basis.

Download Heaven

I hate, hate, Firefox’s way of managing downloads. Chrome’s, on the other hand, is just about perfect. Everything you download appears on a bar at the bottom of the screen, and you can see the progress easily. Once a file is downloaded, you’ll be able to drag and drop the file into any Explorer window to save it there. You can also use the download bar to see where a file is located, open it, or see other files you’ve downloaded in the past. Your downloads are never lost with Chrome, and they’re super-easy to deal with.

Google Toolbar

One great thing about Firefox is its support for Google Toolbar, which allows for easy access to bookmarks, files, Gmail, Google Calendar, and a host of other features. Since Chrome unfortunately still doesn’t have extensions, you can’t directly use the Google Toolbar. However, using “Project Fakebar,” you can get all the features of Google Toolbar to be available to you in Chrome. It takes a bit of legwork (though not more than a few minutes of your time), and is hugely useful for Google lovers like yours truly.

Have you tried using Google Chrome? What’d you think?

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