chrome

Interesting things that you don’t know you can do in your Chrome for Android

July 29, 2016 by Satyapriya

Chrome is the most popular browser among the android users and it is also known to be the fastest browser among the others. There are no extensions available for Chrome’s android version, while there are some other tricks that make it dazzle. Chrome flags are experimental settings or features that are not enabled by default, but if you are curious to try them out, you can give them a try.

You can visit them under chrome://flags, since these are just experimental features, they might not work perfectly, so you should keep that in my mind and if you find something wrong get ready to revert everything you did. And then each time you turn on or off the flags then chrome will prompt to relaunch the app and relaunching will make the changes take effect.

Some useful flags that you can try:

Scroll Anchoring:

Sometimes while searching on the web, your finger may fall on some link accidently, but it will lead to the page which actually don’t want, to avoid such things, here is a flag that you must try. Enabling this flag will make the link to not move even when the page is loading. You can enable this flag by going to this link

chrome://flags/#enable-scroll-anchoring

Reader Mode:

This is one among the gem features that safari of ios has which allows you to read the subject in the web page without any kind of disturbances like ads and any non-essential elements. Enable this by going to the link

chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics

Switch the default option to always or appears to be an article.

Not opening the same page twice:

Sometimes while you are browsing through the various webpages on your phone, you don’t know what tabs are4 actually opened and sometimes and even sometimes you end up opening the same web page twice. Here comes the need of this flag where it will not allow you to do after you enable this flag in the link

chrome://flags/#ntp-switch-to-existing-tab

Switch the option there to match by hostname and that it you are done.

Open Search results fast:

Go to this link to enable this flag

chrome://flags/#prefetch-search-results

You will not be charged any extra data from your data pack, but this will help you to load the web pages about 100-150 milliseconds faster than your usual time.

Try these and make the most out of your Google Chrome for your Android device.

Failure Story – How Internet Explorer disappeared from PC users mind?

May 2, 2016 by computerera

Microsoft wrote its own fate by taking immature decisions for Internet Explorer. I have used IE since its beginning, and discontinued later when the browser became a target for malicious third-party ActiveX controls and other security issues.

Once upon a time, Internet Explorer was the primary browser for Windows users. It has a long history before the present Web 2.0 revolution, but it miserably failed to cope with the current pace.

As per my analysis, here are the few reasons for Internet Explorer’s loss of market share.

1. Security concerns

Hackers targeted Internet Explorer more aggressively than any other browser. PC users accidentally install ActiveX controls while browsing pirated and pornographic content websites through Internet Explorer and become victims of various malware infections. From time to time Microsoft tried to introduce more secure versions of Internet Explorer, but the user base Microsoft has already doesn’t willing to migrate to newer versions.

2. Extensions support

PC users are expecting more functionality from the browsers. Browsing the websites is not sufficient for them. In this segment also Microsoft failed to provide additional functionality to its browser. Initially Opera, Firefox, and later Google Chrome exploited PC uses hearts by offering third-party plug-in support.

If you spend a few hours for Firefox plug-ins or Google Chrome extensions you will come across thousands of scripts which perform virtually any possible tasks for the PC user. That’s why Internet Explorer lost interest in PC users’ mind.

3. Update process

90% of the PC users don’t have proper technical knowledge on the browser and operating system upgradations. In this context painless upgradation process is the key success to any web browser. I am using Google Chrome as my primary browser for five years; it never prompted me to upgrade the browser at any point in time.

Not only Google Chrome but the Firefox browser also silently downloads the latest update and install it on the next browser restart.

But on the other hand, Internet Explorer always nags the user to install the latest version. Giving choice to the user is always a bad idea, particularly applications like browsers which always struggles with dangerous security loopholes.

4. Microsoft Edge became rival to its own Browser

Already Internet Explorer situation is very pathetic, in such a condition Microsoft made a daring move and announced Microsoft Edge browser. Personally, I treat it as the half boiled product from Microsoft. It doesn’t provide web history, there was no extension support until a few days back, and a lot of limitations restricted the PC users to grab the latest browser.

Literally Windows users stuck up with confusion on which browser to use right now. People who are still using Windows 7 and Windows 8 are restricted to use Internet Explorer, at the same time Windows 10 users were completely migrated to Google Chrome by leaving Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft has to rethink about its future strategies. Otherwise, it will completely disappear from the minds of computer users.

Great Method to Sync all your passwords with Google

April 27, 2016 by computerera

It’s hard to create and remember passwords. That’s why people hate passwords. But in today’s scenario passwords became essential for every social networking account.

There are plenty of the third party password managers available to encrypt and store passwords in a safe vault. Personally, I have been using LastPass password manager.

But the main disadvantage with such password manager services is they works “Free” on desktop operating systems like Windows, but we need to subscribe to premium service to sync all the saved passwords to the Android, iOS clients. Here Google inbuilt password manager comes handy.

Chrome offers Password Manager

Did you remember that last time when you entered a username, passwords on any site, Chrome might be prompted with “save the password for this site” message? That indicates the inbuilt password manager functionality embedded into the Google Chrome Browser.

If you have been using Google Chrome for a long time on Desktop and Mobile, you no need to depend on third-party password managers like LastPass, etc.

All the passwords you remembered earlier and now onwards will seamlessly sync on all the platforms such as Windows, Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, etc. So begin to use Google Chrome effectively by exploring these Password Managing options.

Google “Smart Lock” helps too.

Typing lengthy User ID, passwords on mobile apps is the hardest task for all of us. To overcome it Google introduced “Smart Lock” feature which helps both end users and app developers.

Once any username, password for any social account saved in the Google’s Smartlock database, next time when the user tries to login into the new device, it will automatically be logged in. App developers need to implement this mechanism into their apps.