Google Chrome has become the foremost used browser thanks to its speed and ease to use. Besides, it’s many excellent features, including some hidden features that improve your browsing experience. Chrome flags are hidden experimental features of Chrome that haven’t made it to the Chrome interface yet.
Unfortunately, many folks don’t know these features exist thanks to having a rather unconventional method to access them, or they simply don’t use them because being experimental, they may backfire. Considering these are all test features that may not even make it to the stable version of Chrome, bugs tend to be a fairly common occurrence. These features can significantly enhance your browsing experience.
How to Enable Chrome Flags
The good news is that the flag enable process is easy. You are not finding Chrome settings to enable this. you’ll enable this by following the proper way.
- First of all, open Google Chrome.
- Then, click on the address bar and kind the subsequent chrome flags.
- Finally, press Enter on the keyboard.
- Yes, you’ve got done. Now the flags list is open. you’ll scroll through the list to decide on your flag. Besides, you’ll search the flag by searching within the search button.
- Select the menu within the right side of which flag you wish to enable. Click on the Enable menu. After that, you see a message at the bottom of the browser to click on the Relaunch option. When you click on Relaunch, your browser will restart and enable the new flag on the browser.
How to Reset Flags
When you enable a flag, you’ll receive a warning message that tells you the chance of using flags. But it’s unfeasible to spot the status of flags. this can be because flags are unstable and have a less secure protocol. So if you discover some flags don’t seem to be performing perfectly, you’ll disable the flag and reset your browser in the following way.
- To approach the flags, follow the previous session and mention the flags list.
- Then, Find the flag that you simply want to disable and choose the Disable option.
- Alternatively, you’ll be able to disable all flags by clicking on Reset all on the highest of the page.
- After disabling the flags, then the browser is automatically restarted and back to the previous settings.
In this section, we’ve discussed some commonly available flags for both platform desktop and smartphone. you’ll be able to use these flags on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS platforms.
Let’s have a look at them:
1. Force Dark Mode for Web Contents
Dark Mode is beautiful, both aesthetically and for eye comfort reasons. If you’re also an acquaintance of it, you wish all website content to support it. Sadly, not all websites are cooperating, but a secondary option forces the choice on all websites. Open the Chrome Flags page and explore “Force Dark Mode for Web Contents.” Enable the feature through the computer menu next to that.
2. Enable Reader Mode
Like Firefox Reader View, Chrome also encompasses a reader mode, which makes reading online articles easier. once you use this feature on a page, it’ll only show the most content and pictures and strip away everything else, including side panel content and ads.
After enabling the flag, you may see a brand new Page icon within the address bar to click to show in reader mode.
3. Enable Scroll Anchor Serialization
An interesting feature, this setting saves your position if other elements load on the website you are viewing, allowing you to return to where you were.
4. Freeze Tab Groups
Google Chrome has the choice to open heaps of tabs. But usually, we don’t work with all tabs. Whenever plenty of tabs are opened, it utilizes computer RAM and makes our system slow. There is a flag that will freeze all tabs in a group. As a result, the pc runs smoothly because the unused tabs don’t utilize any resources. Search by “freezing” within the flag search bar, and also the new flag comes with the name “Tab Groups Collapse Freezing”. Then you wish to enable this flag.
5. Quieter notification permission prompts
Each darn website wants to send you alerts now! it’s become an annoyance, and we are uninterested in this. Enable this and you’ll be bothered no more. hunt for the “Quieter notification permission prompts” Chrome Flag and enable it. All notification permission prompts are going to be blocked and stop bugging your peaceful browsing. Just just in case you would like to urge notifications from specific websites, a bell icon will appear to correct the address bar. Click on that to access notification permission options.
6. Enable lazy image loading
This feature stops all the pictures on an online page from loading directly. Once enabled, images will only load once you scroll down and reach them. This helps in loading pages faster and also saves bandwidth as required images are only loaded. confirm you select the enable option that allows you to lazy load images without the lazy loading attribute.
7. Block Ads
Chrome has currently developed the reduce ads intervention within the browser. Furthermore, you’re not curious about showing ads on your browser, and you’ll enable a significant ad intervention flag. When you enable this flag, you receive fewer ads on your browser. As a result, it uses fewer resources on your browser and provides you with a smooth and fast browsing experience. So to scale back ad intervention, enable #heavy-ad-privacy-mitigations.
8. Experimental QUIC Protocol
Certain Chrome Flags speed up your browsing experience. QUIC is Google’s protocol, and it’s designed to create the net faster. Enabling this one will speed things up, but only websites are optimized for it. Something is better than nothing, though! On the Chrome Flags page, look for “Experimental QUIC Protocol.” Click on the menu next to that and choose Enabled.
9. Tab Hover Cards
This flag adds a feature to look at more information in a few tabs just by hovering over it. the knowledge includes the page’s main title and URL. This feature is handy for people that open up dozens of tabs simultaneously, so it becomes difficult to determine the tab website name without opening it. With hover cards, you’ll just hover the mouse cursor over a tab to be told which website or page is open.
10. Create Reading List
If you read many articles on the web and use a reading list app like Pocket to save lots of articles to read later, you have got excellent news is that Google has developed a flag to supply the identical service like Pocket.
While you enable this flag, you bookmark the page and find a brand new ‘Add to Reading List’ option. This makes your reading experience amazing. It also permits you to mark the Read and Unread the article. So you enable the #read-later flag and stop the race from reading.
11. Smooth Scrolling
Ever notice your scrolling stutter or that it can get a touch sluggish? There may be many reasons it’s happening, but this Chrome Flag will likely improve things. Just rummage around for “Smooth Scrolling” within the search bar and enable the Chrome Flag. It’s not only a good feature Android users should enable, but you’ll also use them on Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS.
12. GPU rasterization
Rasterization is largely the method of making images or websites pixel-by-pixel to display on your PC. Chrome usually uses your CPU power to finish this process. However, if you have got an infatuated GPU in your PC, you’ll enable this flag to force rasterization to be always completed by GPU instead. GPU can pull down frame generation speed to as low as 5ms/frame from 100ms/frame, so it can significantly boost Chrome speed if you enable this flag.
13. Pull-to-refresh gesture
Aren’t you keen on gestures on Chrome for mobile? We especially like swiping right down to refresh a website, and you’ll bring this feature to your PC with the assistance of Chrome flags. this can be especially helpful after you happen to use a Windows, Linux, or Chrome OS computer with a touchscreen. To enable this hunt for “Pull-to-refresh gesture.” you’ll be able to then opt to enable the feature for any device, otherwise you can choose it to figure with touchscreens only.
14. Share website by using QR Code
This is a stimulating and most useful feature from my point of view. Suppose you visit an internet site, and simultaneously you would like to open the identical link on your smartphone. But it’s not easy; first of all, you would like to shut your desktop browser and open the browser on your smartphone with the identical ID. Then you discover the link in the Chrome history. But if you utilize “enable sharing page via QR Code”, you easily open the identical link on your smartphone.
15. Google Drive Document suggestions
Google Drive is a wonderful tool for creating word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. And since it’s free, it wouldn’t surprise us to work out if any of you employ it commonly. They want more accessible access to your Google Drive Documents? a pleasant Chrome Flag will offer you Google Drive Document suggestions when looking through Omnibox. In the Chrome Flags menu, hunt for “Omnibox Google Drive Document suggestions.” Click on the computer menu next to that and choose Enabled.
16. Parallel downloading
If you’ve got used download manager software before, you need to already understand how they download faster by creating multiple connections. This flag does the identical thing and allows Chrome to form multiple connections to the download source to hurry up the download.
17. Enable Tab Search
This is interesting and useful for power Chrome users who open many tabs at a time. When he wants to travel to the actual tab quickly, he can jump easily by searching the tab and enabling the tab search flag.
This flag helps you to search out the tabs quickly that you just are trying to find. While you enable this flag, you may see a computer menu where you’ll be able to hunt for tabs. Besides, you’ll be able to quickly open the tab search box by pressing the Windows shortcut key ctrl+shift+A.
18. Tab Hover Card Images
If you enable the above card, you’ll also enable this flag to indicate a picture of the tab together with the page information. this may only be enabled once the above-mentioned flag is enabled. The image is going to be of the precise area of the page where you left the tab. this implies you’ll be able to also compare the content of two pages by opening them in two tabs side-by-side.
19. Enable waste bin
Chrome OS doesn’t have any recycle bin or bin. So after you delete any file accidentally, you can not recover the file easily. For this reason, Google has developed a flag which is termed dustbin. After you enable this flag on your Chromebook, you get an ashcan in your Chrome OS, which works similar to Recycle Bin. After enabling this flag, you’ll undo deleted files if you wish.
20. Back Forward Cache
What if we have a navigation key to back and forward websites or search results? Google has a flag that makes it possible to navigate forward and back your site or browse results. This flag can save the whole cache of the website, so it instantly reaches your designated page when you move forward or back. Moreover, it works perfectly despite slowing down your internet connection. To enable this flag, go to #back-forward-cache.
If you enable the above card, you’ll also enable this flag to point to an image of the tab along with the page information. this might only be enabled once the above-mentioned flag is enabled. The image goes to be of the precise area of the page where you left the tab. This means you will be ready to also compare the content of two pages by opening them in two tabs side-by-side.
21. Prevent risky downloads
This flag adds a further layer of security by preventing executable files from being downloaded from insecure sources. Viruses are usually spread as direct executable files, and an insecure source could also be compromised to share these files. This flag will prevent such downloads, but in the end, it can have many false positives too.
22. Enable LiteVideos
If you’re looking to avoid wasting internet data and don’t mind watching videos at standard quality, then enable this flag. This flag will help to tell media requests that your internet is slow, so videos will only load in SD quality.
23. Chrome Duet UI
Many smartphones have an outsized display, and it’s tough to access the house menu or setting. Search Duet within the flag search bar and enable it twice on your mobile.
After enabling the flags, restart your mobile twice, so you discover a button on the underside of your mobile screen. You open the button, and then you can easily switch tabs, search, share, and overflow the menu.
Conclusion
We are using many of those flags myself and haven’t run into any noticeable problems yet. they’re still experimental, though, so depending on your PC and activity, any of those flags can have a negative impact. Thankfully, the flags page can show all the activated flags at the very top. If you notice your Chrome browser acting up, just attend the flags page and undo the changes to mend the difficulty.