A few weeks ago, we wrote about how to boost your productivity by utilizing your web browser’s features. Today, we’ll take an in depth look at some of the newer features of Chrome that help with workflow, tabs, and bookmarks.Some of these features assume that you’re logged into Chrome with your Google account.
Chrome: Browser or Window Manager?
Chrome’s functionality has always been on the cutting-edge of what a browser can deliver. Google must have realized this about a decade and a half ago when they built ChromeOS, which is essentially an operating system that is just Chrome. Even if you’ve never used a Chromebook, it would seem instantly familiar to you if you are a Chrome user on the desktop.
Chrome has blurred the lines between what it does and what you would expect from your operating system: it allows you to install apps directly in the browser, it lets you have multiple tabs like they’re multiple browser windows; it even updates itself in the background without any user intervention. All of these features might look a little more like an operating system than a stand-alone application. Just the other day, Chrome turned on its Energy Saver when my battery got to 20%, conserving power on my laptop just like an operating system does.
Bookmarks and Tabs, Part II
I mentioned in the previous browser post that you could bookmark all of your currently open tabs by pushing Ctrl+Shift+D. What I didn’t mention was that when you do this, you can select a folder to put all of those tabs in. This helps you keep all of the bookmarks organized, but it gets better… if you create a new folder directly in the Bookmarks Bar folder (to save all of those tabs in) then the folder will appear as a dropdown menu on your Bookmarks Bar. If you want to open all of those tabs at once, simply right-click the folder and select how you want to open all of them: in new tabs, in a new window, etc.
Using Tab Groups
If you were interested in the idea of setting up user profiles, but don’t use multiple Google accounts, a good half-measure between the two is to use the Tab Groups functionality in Chrome. Instead of having multiple users that switch between, you can just group the tabs that you use for the same task. You can do this by right clicking a tab, and adding it to a (new) group.
(Notice the cool ways to close tabs at the bottom of this context menu!)
Name the group and give it a color. When you have a Tab Group, it can be collapsed by clicking its name. You can also declutter the window you’re using by sending the group to another window; you will find that setting by right-clicking the group’s name.
Reopen Tabs from your History
When you need to close all of your tabs to restart your workstation after updates, or close your browser for any other reason, you could bookmark all of the open tags and give it a new folder… but there’s another easy way to re-open those tabs—and you don’t have to set up anything or remind yourself to look at your Bookmarks Bar..
If you’ve recently closed a Chrome window, you can navigate to the Menu (three dots in the upper-right part of the window), and hover over History; it will show Recently Closed, which you can also hover over to see a list of the sites you were on. Here, you can click “Restore Window” and up will come all of the pages that you had opened. As you can also see on your history, it has all of the tabs from your other devices on which you use Chrome. This means that you can pick up right where you left off across all of your devices.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team