Use the secret options of the Google Chrome browser

The func­tion­al­i­ty of the Google Chrome brows­er is wider than you can imag­ine. But many fea­tures are not avail­able through the stan­dard set­tings. You can find them on a spe­cial ser­vice page called Chrome Flags. To get to it, copy and paste the text into the address bar of your brows­er chrome://flags

On the page you will see sev­er­al dozen options marked as Default (default val­ue), Enabled (enabled) and Dis­abled (dis­abled). Most of the options pre­sent­ed here are exper­i­men­tal fea­tures, or fea­tures required for offi­cial use only. But there are some fea­tures that will be use­ful to any user. Let’s talk about the most inter­est­ing secret fea­tures of Chrome.

Picture in Picture

Today, many brows­er devel­op­ers are exper­i­ment­ing with pic­ture-in-pic­ture func­tion­al­i­ty. Chrome also has this option. To acti­vate it, find the option #enable-pic­ture-in-pic­ture and switch it to Enabled. Then restart your brows­er.

Now while watch­ing a YouTube video, you can twice click on it right click and select the Pic­ture-in-Pic­ture option from the con­text menu. A small video win­dow will appear, which will be locat­ed on top of all win­dows, even on top of the desk­top. Thus, you can min­i­mize the brows­er, but con­tin­ue watch­ing the video. With the left mouse but­ton, the win­dow can be freely dragged around the screen. All in all, a very use­ful and handy fea­ture.

Autocomplete Forms

If you want Chrome to auto­mat­i­cal­ly fill out com­mon­ly used forms on web­sites, like an email field, look for the option #show-aut­ofill-type-pre­dic­tions and switch it to Enabled. Then restart your brows­er. To dis­able auto­com­plete, vis­it the Chrome Flags page again and tog­gle the same set­ting to Dis­abled.

Autoload pages as soon as possible

Para­me­ter #enable-offline-auto-reload allows the brows­er to auto­mat­i­cal­ly down­load pages that did not load due to lack of Inter­net, as soon as the con­nec­tion to the net­work is restored.

Para­me­ter #enable-offline-auto-reload-vis­i­ble-only does the same, but only with active tabs.

Restoring a page from the cache

You must have come across such a sit­u­a­tion. You went to a page, after a while you need­ed to get to it again, but you find that the site is no longer avail­able. In this case, you can try to load a saved ver­sion of the page from the browser’s cache. To do this, you need to enable the option #show-saved-copy

Lazy loading of images

This set­ting can be use­ful if your inter­net traf­fic is lim­it­ed. If you enable the option #enable-lazy-image-load­ing , images on sites will only load when you scroll direct­ly to them. Of course, load­ing may be slow­er in this case, but traf­fic is saved due to pic­tures that will remain out of your field of vision.

Automatic password generation

The brows­er can auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate pass­words for you if it detects that you are on the account reg­is­tra­tion page. To do this, you need to enable the option #auto­mat­ic-pass­word-gen­er­a­tion . The main thing — do not for­get to write down pass­words gen­er­at­ed in this way some­where.