10 flags you should enable right away if you work on Google Chrome!
Okay, the last article I wrote was fairly technical, diving into AI and Pose Estimation and all those tech tidbits. But this right here, guys, is one of those which may simply enlighten just anybody out there! And I mean it.
Yes, as the title suggests, Chrome Flags! You might as well call these tips and tricks, or even hacks, that would make your web browsing lives damn easier. All in all, here are a few things you should know if you work with Chrome. Otherwise, you’re just missing out on too much!
A bit of a layman background on it — umm, Chrome actually maintains a repository of experimental features, which are not yet deployed. And these can be accessed by simply typing ‘chrome://flags’ in the URL bar of the browser and pressing enter!
And there you go, hundreds of ‘under the hood’ features at your disposal! And in this article, I will take you through the coolest of those that you can make use of (dated Oct 2020).
Before starting, here is a video demonstration on my Youtube Channel giving a use-case demo of the Top-5 of these flags that come in so handy. Every. Single. Day. You’ll love it!
Alright, here we go!
Tab Groups
I bet many of you must have found yourselves in a situation while browsing when you end up opening so many tabs in a single window, and that kinda messes the mood up! If you hate that as well, here are tab groups at your disposal!
Chrome is actually rolling this feature out slowly, but nevertheless, you should know about it.
Now to get these, like said before, type in ‘chrome://flags’ in the URL bar. Search for tab groups. Enable 1) #tab-groups & 2) #tab-groups-collapse (This will let you collapse your tab group on clicking on it, which is a pretty neat thing to look at)
Relaunch the browser, and you’re good to play with the feature. By right-clicking on any tab, you add it to a new group or an existing group. Whatever works for you. You can even name and assign a color to the group. Pretty sleek!
Hover Cards
Now, this comes in really handy when you have so, soo many tabs opened, and you want to fly back to a particular webpage, but can’t really remember which tab it is in (because maybe the titles are cropped). Here’s what you need, tab preview cards!
You see, you just need to hover the cursor on the tab to get a preview of what it is.
To get this, the same story — Chrome Flags. You’ll have to enable 1) #tab-hover-card, and 2) #tab-hovercard-images.
You got it!
QR Code Generator
Let’s say you are browsing on Facebook on your PC, and you come across something that you wanna open up on your phone/ tablets. Can be anything for that matter, any URL on the internet you wanna open up on your phones. What would you do? Here’s what I do -
A one-click QR Code Generator for any URL that you find on the internet! Amazing right. The name of the flag is #sharing-qr-code-generator. Go on, enable it.
Picture-In-Picture Mode
Again, Chrome is slowly rolling this one out in the stable version but if you’re a multi-tasker, just wanna make sure y’all know this! Wanna watch some Netflix (or any video for that matter) while reading a Medium article? Or writing a report? And yes, on the same screen (same tab). Got you there!
Interesting, right? All you have to do is enable the #global-media-controls-picture-in-picture Flag on the Experiments page!
Dark Mode
One for the dark mode lovers here. You’ll be damned to know that using this flag you’d be able to force a dark mode on ANY website in the world. Yes, even Google, or LinkedIn.
All you have to do is enable the #enable-force-dark flag. And you’re good to go.
But here’s one catch. It would have been amazingly convenient if the flag could provide a tag somewhere on the toolbar to switch between the dark and normal modes. The dark mode doesn’t really suit some of the webpages.
Faster Downloading
You might as well guess this from the title of how amazing this one is! The ‘Parallel Downloading’ Flag accelerates the downloading process by breaking the file into smaller chunks, and downloading, umm, parallelly. In other words, similar to what IDM and other cool downloading managers do!
So go on, search for the #enable-parallel-downloading Flag, and switch it on!
Reader Mode
Those of you who’ve used Safari might know about the read mode feature they have for a smooth experience while reading articles! Good news, Chrome has added a similar flag to its list!
This one allows you to remove all the glitter and unnecessary advertisements from the article webpage. Now, it’s not available for every website, but many of the blog posts. Pretty neat!
Switch on the #enable-reader-mode flag and you got it!
Clipboard Sharing among devices
Have you seen one of those AR videos where the person clicks a picture on his/her phone and transfers it to the PC by simply waving it? I am sorry, don’t get your expectations too high, but this one is very lightly similar.
You can copy something on your browser on your Android phones and transfer that to your PC Clipboard. It can be a long ass article or a URL that you want to open up on your PC.
And for that, you’ll have to switch on the flags on your phone browser and PC browser, both. The flag for your phone would #shared-clipboard-ui and the flag you need to enable on your PC would be #remote-copy-receiver.
Google Lens (Android)
Another one for the Android Users. You can now use google lens by simply holding the image for a while and clicking on Google Lens on the dropdown!
Enable it by switching on #context-menu-search-with-google-lens
In fact, you can play around with other Google Lens flags that you may find on searching google lens on your phones. Do comment if you find something cool, LOL!
Smooth Scrolling (Android)
Not much to say about it, since the name says it all. It makes the scrolling on heavy webpages, like Reddit, amazingly smooth. And that brings it to the top 10, tbh!
#smooth_scrolling is the flag that you’d enable to get this feature on your phones.
A few more...
the repository is pretty vast, and just 10 flags won’t really do justice or reflect how awesome these flags can be! So here are a few more flags that you can check out
- #read-later: lets you save tabs for accessing later
- #quiet-notification-prompts: to avoid the annoying notification prompts on every other website
- #live-captions: generates caption for nearly any video playing on your browser
- #extension-toolbar-menu: if the piled up extensions near your address bar annoy you then use this
- #enable-lazy-image-loading & #enable-lazy-frame-loading: would load the images and frames only when the user scrolls there. Hence, would load your webpages faster
- #interest-feed-content-suggestions (Android): would bring a suggestion-card UI on the home page when you open the browser
- #enable-tab-groups-ui-improvements (Android): A toolbar would be created on the bottom of your screens to navigate through tabs easily!
And many more…
Now here’s the question of the day,
Are Chrome Flags safe?
And the answer is, Yes! They very much are safe. Especially the ones that I have mentioned in this article are tested. They might just a bit unstable sometimes based on the version of Chrome or OS that you use, or if you end up switching just TOO MANY flags on.
Also, these flags are supported on other Chromium-based Browsers as well.
Even Edge has its own repository of such experiments which can be accessed on ‘edge://flags’.
With this, I’d conclude this article on some of the most useful Chrome Flags that you can enable for daily use! Would love to hear what you think about these, down in the comments, and if any of these manages to become your favorite!
Also, do share if you come across any such flag that you think has the potential to make it up to the top 10.
Thanks for Reading!