Steve Dotto.
How are you today?
I am doing just fine.
Thanks for asking.
Today, I want to talk about getting more out of our web browser.
Now I have to admit that I’ve been a little bit of a philandering web browser user.
Back in the day, of course, I used Internet Explorer and then once Firefox came along
I was madly in love with Firefox.
We had a torrid relationship that lasted for quite some time but Firefox kind of got slow
and didn’t seem to quite do it for me anymore and I found a new browser.
I found Chrome and Chrome and I formed a bit of a bond.
Now I’ve moved over to Chrome and I spend most of my time with Chrome, although I do
spend some time in Safari and a little bit of time in Firefox occasionally.
I feel a little bit guilty about jumping from browser to browser but that’s the nature
of me.
I suppose I’m just not cut out to be a one-browser kind of guy.
Having said that, I really like what Chrome brings to the table currently and I’m using
it an awful lot and I thought I’d share with you like eight awesome features that
are within Chrome that will make your web browsing experience that much better because
we spend so much of our time now in our browser.
So without any further ado, I’m going to lightning-ly quickly go through eight features
within Chrome that you might want to incorporate.
The first is one that I know you’re going to want to use.
It’s called pinning tabs and what you do when you pin a tab is you take all of these
large tabs that we have across the top of the window here and you make them small.
This is for the tabs that you always have open.
If there are certain pages that you are always at, regardless of what’s going on in your
life—I use email in the browser so I always have my email open—well, instead of taking
up all the physical space here that it takes up, right-click your mouse on it, say “Pin
tab” and it reduces it down to about a quarter or less of the space.
I’ve still got the tab there.
It’s still using up resources and all that.
It’s not like it’s going to make the computer faster but it’s going to take less real
estate here at the top.
So by pinning a few tabs, the tabs that you always have open, that is a great way for
you to reclaim some real estate at the top of the screen.
Now don’t go crazy doing this.
Don’t decide that you can have all of your bookmarks open because these tabs can take
up a small amount of space because every window you have open takes up some resources on your
computer.
You lose a little bit of memory and the computer is going to perform a little less faster as
a result.
But for the ones that you want to always have open, this is a great way to set them up and
to always have them open.
While we’re talking about open tabs, a lot of times, depending on what services you sign
up for, you can lose your presets.
When you first install Chrome, it’s going to open to the YouTube or the Google page
but then if you install different services, sometimes you’ll notice that all of a sudden
your Search preferences change or something changes within your settings and when you
open a new window it opens to a different page, or when you start a browser sessions
it opens to a different set of pages.
Well, you can set that up and you can regain control over that by going into your settings
under Chrome Preferences, go into your Settings are and then on startup, you can ask it to
open a new page, open a specific page, or a set of pages.
So if you want to have four or five pages that you always open to when you start a session,
you can set this here in Set pages.
Now be warned that typically when you install a file downloading service or some other types
of apps or some other type of services that you might sign up for, it’ll sometimes change
these preferences.
It’s kind of one of the deals that these guys do in order to make money.
So they might change your settings so you might have to go in here from time to time
and reset it.
Along with that reset is sometimes the need to reset where you go automatically for search,
when you type in this bar at the top which interestingly is called the Omnibar because
it’s not a search bar or a URL bar anymore.
No, no, no.
This bar along the top does far more than just bringing us to websites, which I’ll
talk about in a moment.
We call it the Omnibar in Chrome.
But when I’m typing in a search here, by choosing which search engine from this pop-up
menu here within my Settings, I will determine the search engine I’m going to use as my
primary search engine.
Sometimes people will change that to Yahoo or to Bing if you install a service.
So if they automatically make some changes to your preferences, you go back in here to
rechange that.
Now while I’m talking about the Omnibar, let’s stay on that and let me show you one
of the coolest things.
This is an intelligent bar.
You notice now that it’s always making suggestions as you’re typing and as you start to type
in a search, it’s bringing up the most relevant searches that have been asked for by other
people in that same area.
But it does more than that.
It also does math for you.
So instead of having to open your calculator if you have to do some simple calculations
and if you just want to figure out 48 times 6, watch what happens.
When I put in 48 times 6, it gives me the answer here and this works for lots of different
types of equations.
So you don’t have to go to the calculator app when you have simple calculations to do.
You can do it right in the Omnibar.
Isn’t that cool?
I knew you’d like that one.
Let’s talk about something called incognito mode next.
Now incognito mode, when we’ve signed in we know that using cookies and different things
like that in the Preferences when we return to websites, quite often they recognize that
we’ve been there before and a history of our visit to those websites is built up within
our web browser.
That is something that we don’t necessarily always want to have happening, some people
because they’re going to websites that they don’t want other people to know about, don’t
necessarily want to have a history recorded of them visiting a website.
But a little more legitimately, we want to be able to sign in to say a different Google
account without having to quit and sign out of our existing account.
I’ve got multiple Google accounts for different purposes I have so rather than start a new
browser session in a different session, what I can do is I go and I right-click on the
Chrome icon here on my taskbar, in my Menu bar in the bottom, and I create a new incognito
window.
It’s got this little spy here happening here.
So what happens here is it’s not going to be recording any of the history and it doesn’t
have any cookies or it doesn’t create any internet trail of my journey here online.
I’m in incognito mode.
I’m in stealth mode so if I want to sign in to a different Gmail account, I can do
so in incognito mode.
That way, I can have multiple instances of my different Google accounts running at the
same time.
That’s a pretty cool service as well.
Next up, I want to show you how to detach a tab.
Sometimes as we’re working, we might want to have multiple windows open and we might
not want to have to go jump back and forth within the tabs here.
What we can is we can actually, by grabbing a tab, we can either rearrange where it is
in the list in a sequence of tabs along the tap.
You can just drag it or if you drag it out into the window, you could turn it into an
entirely separate window just by dragging.
That works really well and you’re cutting and pasting in documents or if you have one
document you want to have open the whole time while you’re researching other documents
or while you’re doing some other sorts of writing.
So I quite lack that ability to occasionally grab a tab, drag it out and hey, guess what?
You can also drag right back in.
if you grab on the tab there, you can drag it back in and you can reincorporate it into
your main window.
Pretty click, eh?
The next feature is one of my absolute favorite features that’s built into Chrome and that’s
the ability for me to use my Google account to sync my instances of Chrome across multiple
devices.
In other words, all of my bookmarks, all of my passwords, all of my different settings
and preferences that I set up here on my main desktop computer, I can mirror those settings
on my notebook or on my tablet, any other place that I use Chrome.
I do that once again by going into the preferences.
By the way, I’m going into the Preferences here from the Chrome Menu.
You see these little bars over here at the side of the browser?
I can also go to my preferences and my settings here by clicking here in that menu.
When I do, either one of those two menu settings, I’m brought into this sign area that allows
me to connect it to my Google account.
So I’m connecting this instance of Chrome to my Google account, my Gmail account basically.
If I do that, then I can set it up so that the preferences sync across.
If I click here on the Google dashboard, it will tell me all of the different types of
settings and all of the different data that’s being synced into the different platforms,
into my notebook and in this case into my tablet because I’ve got it set up for all.
So I’ve got 9 apps, 22 extensions, 69 settings, history, autofill so that it automatically
fills in things like addresses, passwords are saved there, all of that and all of my
bookmarks are all saved in multiple instances using the Chrome sync feature, which is just
awesome.
Now the last thing that I want to show you is something that a lot of people don’t
use.
A lot of people will search, they’ll do a Google search for something, they’ll open
a page once they’ve searched for it and found it and then they scroll through, looking
for why that page was recommended to them, especially if they’re searching for a term.
A lot of times we forget that you can just hit the command key F or Apple key F to find
within a document.
You type in a word and it will highlight that word.
It will find that word within a document.
So just like in a word processor, you can do a search within any web page or any website
that you’re on or the page that you landed on right within Chrome.
So those are eight, I think, awesome, simple tools, once that I use almost every day and
have become second nature for me to make your web browsing experience that much more efficient.
Now I shouldn’t disparage any of the other browsers.
Most of them will do a lot of this.
Things like the Chrome sync is kind of unique and there are workarounds that you can do
in other areas with that.
Other browsers have some other features that are cool and maybe even cooler than some of
the ones we looked at but for me right now, Chrome is the leader of the pack and in a
large part due to a lot of these different interface things that they’ve added.
I hope you found our video today to be useful.
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So thanks for spending time with us this week.
We’ll see you again next time right here on DottoTech.
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