How's it going everyone, I'm ThioJoe, and
today we're going to take a look at 11 settings in Google Chrome that you should probably
change. These may be things you'll want to disable,
or cool stuff that is disabled by default, that you will want to enable. Now, I'm using version 63 of Chrome, which
is actually the current beta version, so if you're watching this video at a later date,
or you're not using the beta version, things may look a bit different, so don't be surprised
at that. I think you'll find these interesting, and
also be sure to subscribe for more videos like this, and enable notifications by clicking
the bell, or YouTube is not going to show you my new videos even if you do subscribe,
because the YouTube algorithm is a steaming dumpster fire. Anyway, let's get started. To start off, we have a feature that last
I checked is enabled by default that you probably want to disable. So go to settings, click advanced, then under
system look for the option called "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome
is closed." I don't know about you, but when I close Google
chrome, I expect it to actually close, and not have apps keep running in the background
I don't know about.
I mean really, what browser apps do I want
to keep running, if I'm not even using the browser? So yea, I'd disable that if I were you and
save some system resources. Ok, number two, this one is also in the settings
page, but this time under Privacy and Security. Look for the setting that says "Automatically
send some system information and page content to Google to help detect dangerous apps and
sites". This one is disabled by default, but me personally,
I think it's worth it to actually enable it. If you're very privacy conscious you don't
have to, but there are so many malicious websites out there that if more people enable this
setting, it'll end up benefitting yourself in the future. Plus, it may make it more likely Chrome will
detect a new malicious site you go on even if it hasn't scanned it before.
Alright now all the rest of the settings we're
going to go over are actually in a hidden settings menu called the Chrome Flags menu. Getting there is really simple, you just go
to the URL bar and type in Chrome://Flags, and hit enter. It will warn you these are experimental features,
so it's best to not go randomly enabling and disabling features without knowing what they
do. Again this menu might have a different design
based on your version of chrome, but the functionality is the same. So let's move on. So for number 3, do a search for a setting
called "Show Saved Copy Button". You can either search for it at the top, or
hit Control + F and type it in there.
What this does, is will allow you to load
a cached version of a website, if that website either fails to load, or you are currently
offline. So to enable it, go to the dropdown and select
"primary. That way, you can at least look at a previous
version of the website even if it's not live, which might still be helpful. With this enabled, on the failed to load page,
you'll see a button to load the saved copy. If you're wondering what the secondary option
means, it just changes whether the Load copy button is on the left or right, so it doesn't
really matter. Next number 4, this one is really great, it's
called "Parallel Downloading". So search for that one and turn it to enabled. This will let chrome use multiple download
threads to speed up the downloading of a file. This means if a website has a limit for how
fast you can download a file, chrome can basically download multiple parts of that file in parallel,
so you can cut the download speed to a fraction.
There's not really much documentation on this
feature so I'm not sure how well it works, and if it does it every time, but I don't
see a reason to not enable it unless you start having issues or something. By the way, there are extensions that can
do this as well, I'm not going to get into those because it's beyond the scope of this
video, but you can look those up. Hopefully this feature will make those obsolete
and just work as well without any extensions. Moving on, for number 5, look for a setting
called "Smooth Scrolling", which is on be default. This is a personal preference, but I really
hate smooth scrolling so I disabled it. It just changes the way it feels to scroll
on a page, and makes it seem a lot slower and sluggish. You can turn it off and on to compare for
yourself, but I find when smooth scrolling is disabled, scrolling with the mousewheel
just feels so much more responsive and instant, whereas there seems to be a bit of a delay
otherwise.
That's because to smooth out the scroll movement,
it has to slowly build up speed, then slow down to a halt. It's not something you would really notice
until you compare it for yourself, so try it out and see. Number 6, this one is really cool, look for
the setting called "New omnibox answers in suggest types" and enable that. This makes it so you can type questions and
other queries into the omnibox or URL bar, and it can offer answers right there. For example, if I type in "2nd president of
the USA", it will give me the answer John Adams right in the auto-complete dropdown,
instead of having to do a search for it.
The only problem is, it actually really sucks
at working half the time, and you can type something in one time, and it will answer,
and if you type it in again two seconds later, it won't. So it's definitely hit or miss, but I guess
not bad to have enabled anyway, and you can always just hit enter to do a google search
which will show you the same information. Ok number 7, I really like this one, it also
has to do with the omnibox. It's a setting called "Omnibox UI Show Suggestion
Favicons", that you can enable. What this does, is when you type something
into the URL bar, and it lists the suggestions, it will now show the favicon, or the site
icon next to each result.
So this is really great if you're searching
for a website you visited previously, and the results are from a bunch of different
sites, you can more quickly identify results from the site you're looking for by the icon. Plus I think it just looks nicer, because
before it would just show little icons that didn't mean anything, and it was sometimes
hard to sift through the results. This is definitely one of my favorites I'd
say. Number 8, this one is something you may or
may not want to enable, called "Automatic tab discarding".
What this will do, is if you have a lot of
chrome tabs open, and your computer starts to run low on memory, it will stop running
some tabs you haven't been using. This way, those tabs are no longer using up
resources in the background. And if you do want to go back to it, Chrome
will simply reload the page when you click on the tab again. The only downside I can see is if you have
tabs running in the background that are actually doing something, I don't know, like a game
or something, you don't want that to close, because if you refresh it will mess things
up. So you can decide youreslf whether to enable
this, based on if your computer runs out of memory a lot, or if you use a ton of tabs,
and what you usually have running in those tabs. Onto number 9, this is seriously one of my
favorite features that as far as I know is not enabled by default for some reason. It's called "Tab audio muting UI control",
and makes it really easy to mute annoying tabs that are playing sounds.
When something is playing sound in a tab,
chrome by default will tell you which tab it is using a little speaker icon. To mute that tab, you can normally right click
it and hit "mute tab". But if you enable this feature, you can mute
the tab simply by clicking on the little speaker icon. Sure, it only saves you one click, but it's
so simple that it's a no brainer. Alright coming near the end, number 10 is
called "Fast tab/window close". This is another one I like to have enabled. Normally when you go to close a tab, Chrome
will stop any javascript applets running or anything else, and once that's all stopped,
will close the tab. But sometimes that might take a second, which
will seem like a delay when you're closing tabs, and can get annoying if you have to
close a bunch of tabs at once. With this, according to the limited documentation,
Chrome will immediately close the tab visually, then shut down anything running from that
tab in the background. I like this because if I close a tab, I want
it to just disappear because it's taking up space, I don't care if Chrome has to take
an extra second for it to close it in the background.
So this is nice. And finally number 11, this feature is really
amazing to enable, called "Scroll Anchoring". Now it does technically work on desktop I
guess, but if you're on Android, you can also enable this, and that's where it really shines. Basically, scroll anchoring can help prevent
the page from jumping whenever you go on a site, and it keeps loading new stuff. For example, how many times have you gone
to a site, and you start reading it on your phone, and the STUPID FREAKIN ads start loading,
and pushing everything out of the way, SO obnoxious. When scroll anchoring is working, you won't
actually notice, because it simply stops the page from doing that. But over time I'm sure you'll start to take
note that it happens less and less often. And I guess this does happen on desktop every
once in a while too, just less often, but still worth it to keep enabled. So, that's everything hope you enjoyed it. If you want to keep watching I'll put some
other videos right here you can watch, and on my channel I've got a ton of other Chrome
related videos you can check out.
Be sure to let me know down in the comments
if I missed anything, and if you want to subscribe I make new videos every tuesday thursday saturday. And again consider enabling notifications
by clicking that bell. Looking forward to hearing from you guys,
so thanks for watching I'll see you next time, have a good one..
