Chrome Flags: A Complete Guide To Enhance Your Browsing Experience
Mar. 7, 2020What are Chrome Flags?
Chrome flags are a set of experimental features and settings that are buried in Chrome for developers and tinkerers. These experimental features include functionality that Google is working on but hasn’t enabled yet for general consumers. The feature list on Chrome flags is pretty extensive but it should interest you if you love tinkering with new features. Chrome flags let you improve your browsing performance and also allowyou to use new in-development features.
They also pack advanced options like hardware andGPU acceleration, which should be great for developer testing. What we just mentioned is just the tip of the iceberg, as the features and options of Chrome flags are indeed overwhelming. If you are a developer or someone who just likes to experiment with new under-cooked features, then you’ll love messing around with these feature flags.
1. Launch Chrome and open thebelow address.
2. Here, you’ll see along list of features that you can enable or disable. You can easily search for specific features by typing in the search box.
4. After you select the “Enable” or “Disable” option, you will be presented with a “Restart” button. Click on it to apply the changes.
5. If you feel that your Chrome experience has become unstable but can’t find the flag that might have caused it, you can use the “Reset all” button to restore all the settings.
Apart from thedark UI on Chrome, Google has also brought afull-fledged dark modefor web pages as well. It works just like the Dark Reader extension. And the best part is that the earlier issue of inverting the images has been resolved. So now you don’t need an extra extension for making web pages dark as a hidden Chrome Flag has taken care of it.
Since you are testing Chrome Flags, it’s essential that you enable this flag toquickly enable or disable some key Chrome Flags. Chrome has added a newexperimental menu on the toolbarthat lets you access flags such as Reading List and Tab Scrolling. Just paste the below address in Chrome and turn on the flag to find a new Flags tool in the top-right corner. Note that, it is currently available on Chrome Beta.
Hover Card is a new way to identify and navigate through tabs. It’s especially helpful when you are dealing with lots of Chrome tabs. Basically, if you enable this flag then apreview image of the tabwill show in the form of a hovercard. I am using this feature on my Chromebook and it’s absolutely great for seamless navigation.
Tab Groups is again a flag for those users who are tab hoarders. It basically lets you organize tabs into visually distinct groups. For example, you canorganize a group of tabsin a common color so that you can easily move to that certain group of tabs. You can assign colors based on their different set of tasks. And save them as well.
In order to make media controls on Chrome accessible, Chrome has brought a global flag that will allow you toplay/pause/change tracksfrom a single location. If you enable the flag, you will find the toolbar on the top-right corner.
While Safari has an excellent Reader Mode, we do not have such a feature on Google Chrome. However, there is a hidden Chrome flag that lets you enable Reader mode on Chrome. You get a barebone reader mode whichsimplifies the web pageandremoves unnecessary ads. Sure, it’s not as good as Safari’s Reader Mode, but it does work.
Parallel Downloading has been in the Chrome Flags repository for a very long time. It seems Google is not working on this feature to make it part of the stable channel. Nevertheless, this flagaccelerates download speedby breaking the files into smaller chunks, similar to howIDM and other download managerswork.
This is a flag for advanced users who want to protect their identity online. Chrome allows you to conceal your local IP address with multicast DNS hostnames. It modifies the IP address to small networks of hostnames toanonymize your identity. However, it only works when the webRTC framework is being followed.
When you have a lot of tabs open in Chrome, the experience can get a little sluggish especially while scrolling. Thanks to the “smooth scrolling” implementation, (which is still in the testing stage) you can get asmoother scrolling experience.
This Chrome flag makes sure that GPU and hardware acceleration are used instead of the default software rendering. When this flag is enabled, thesystem forces the usage of GPU resourceswhile overriding software rendering. This flag should come in handy for developers wanting to test their apps or websites with GPU acceleration rather than software rendering.
Frequently Asked Questions
To access the Chrome flags page, open the Google Chrome browser on your Android, Windows, or Mac device. Then, in the address bar, type chrome://flags/ and hit enter. That should open the flags page for you.
The only URL used to access the flags page is chrome://flags/. There are no alternate URLs to access it.
If you want to enable feature flags on Chrome, head over to the Chrome flags page via chrome://flags/. Here, the feature flags will be either in theDefault,Enabled, orDisabledstate. If you want to enable a disabled feature, just tap on the drop-down menu beside it and enable it.
Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.
