Hi, this is Mike Callahan, Doctor File Finder and welcome to part one of our special Butterscotch.com 10 part series on Google Chrome. Now, Google Chrome is a web browser. It was released by Google and at immediately drew a lot of attention because it became apparent that Google was entering the browser market or the so-called browser worse. Google responded to this by saying that they were creating a browser because so many of their products and applications utilize the web browser like Gmail, Google documents and lots more.
Now you can see here that Chrome is not very fancy. It has very plain graphics for front back, reload, home. It’s got basic icons and graphics but like everything that Google does they an interests in approach to most every aspect of the browser, so they take a different look at tabs. They have an incognito mode. They have an interests in approach to the history, to your bookmark manager, to the way they handle downloads, probably import bookmarks and settings and even the options that are available. So this is Google Chrome and that concludes part one.
Now in this segment we’re going to look at bookmarks and how Google Chrome handles those. I have Google Chrome loaded on my desktop. Now if you want to bookmark a site like Butterscotch.com just go to the front of the address bar and click the star. It pops up a small dialog where you could type in the name or have the site name and you can also select where you want that bookmark to go until the bookmarks bar into other bookmarks or choose another folder. I am going to leave it on the bookmarks bar. I say close.
Now this here is the bookmarks bar and I personally find it extremely useful because I keep these sites I go to most here. So I don’t have to go into my bookmarks. I could just click up here my Gmail, my Tucows, Google and Remember the Milk and so on. Now the other bookmarks folder that I mentioned is here and these are all your different bookmarks folder that you have.
Now another nice thing about Google Chrome is that under the wrench icon which is your options. You can import your bookmarks and settings from both Internet Explorer and Firefox. So that way you get them all in there and with the address bar you can have it so that’s always showing or that is not showing at all. I personally like having it showing.
And then lastly, when you create a new tab by clicking this plus sign in Google Chrome it shows you the most visited sites and it’s kind of like a speed dial that’s available in Opera. There is also a plug in for it for Firefox but in Google Chrome, it comes by default and if the sites that you visit most often change then this will change and that concludes part two.
Now in this segment we’re going to look at the options that are available with Chrome. So with Chrome open in my desktop I will go over here and click on the wrench icon, move down to options and click on that. Now you can see there are three tabs here.
The first one is called basics and in this tab, the first thing that you can set is start up. You can have it start up with a homepage, had it restore pages that were opened when you last used Chrome or you can set a number of pages that will open each time you open Chrome. You can put as many pages in there as you want. You can set a homepage. You can tell it to use a new tab as their homepage to open up particular page and you can also decide whether you want a home button showing in the tool bar.
In this tab you can also set what your default searches and you can also set Chrome as your default browser. While the next tab is called, “minor tweaks”. Here you can set a default download location and I always recommend that because it is nice to have one place where you know files download to. Now I have mine set on the desktop. You will have to set particular folder but it is nice to be able to know where your files where downloaded to.
Conversely there is an option here. They have Chrome SQ each time you download where you want to file save. You can tell Chrome to offer the save passwords or the never to save passwords and you can have it show you the passwords that has save. Also on this tab you can change the font and language settings.
And then on the last tab under the hood it deals with some privacy settings but shows suggestions for navigation errors, enable phishing and malware protection. You want to have that check. Help make Google Chrome better by sending statistics to Google. I want to see Google Chrome get better so I have that check and then here you can also determine how you want cookies to be handled. Allow cookies, block cookies or strict how third party cookies are used and then you can have to show you what cookies are in your computer. So those are the options in Google Chrome and that concludes part three.
Today I'm going to look just a little bit at the download function of Google Chrome which is a little different than some other browsers. We’ll click over here on the wrench icon, go down the options and you can see here on the options on the minor tweaks tab. You can set a download location by clicking here, browsing around your computer and picking a spot where you want all files to be saved or you can tell Google Chrome to ask you where to save each file before you download it.
Now my personal recommendation is always been to set a specific place for downloaded files to go because that way you always know where they are. That is just my preference. I want to hit close. Now the other thing we can do is click on the wrench icon, go to downloads and here you see it shows us a summary of the most recent programs we have downloaded. It shows you the date, it shows you the link, show you the URL to where you downloaded it from and you can also click and it will show it in a folder so you can see the file right there.
Another thing that you can do if you go to download a file or download registry booster, you see the arrow and it tells you that this type of file can harm your computer, are you sure you want to download. You click save and you see here it shows that your download is completed.
You can actually launch the program installation by double clicking here and if you click on this show all downloads it takes you back to the page that we were on previously. So the download function of Google Chrome is fast, efficient, not a lot of thrills but it works very well and I like it and that concludes part four.
Today, I am going to take a look at the safe browsing feature that’s built-in to Google Chrome. Now in the business that they are in of providing search results and ads on web pages, Google encounters millions of web pages. So with that experience and information available for them, they put safe browsing as an integral part of Chrome.
So if you should encounter a page that Google has already encountered that they believe contains malware, you are going to get a page that looks like this and the background is a dark bright red and it has warnings “visiting the site may harm your computer”. It gives the main link of the site. It tells you that it appears to host malware. It gives you the option to learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software. If you’re really smart you will probably click back to safety button. For whatever reason you believe either Google is wrong or you just want to be daring then you need to click the box that says “I understand that visiting this site might harm my computer” and then click proceed anyway.
Another page that you may see from Google safe browsing is this diagnostic page that gives you the diagnostic from Google for a particular domain. So it says this status for this domain is not currently listed as suspicious. What happen when Google last visited this site? Does it have any malware on it? No, it has not in the last past 90 days and so on. So these things give you valuable, helpful information that keep you and your family safe while you're browsing on the internet and that concludes part five.
In this part, I am going to look at tabs in Google Chrome. Tabs had become very popular in web browsers and this is no exception in Chrome except Chrome has added some interesting properties to tabs. You can see here I have a few tabs loaded. You can see I went to this Tucows tab to be over towards the front. I can simply move it, just click left mouse button, hold it down and drag it and I can click here move this into the middle and everything shifts.
When you click the plus sign, you see a list of your most frequently visited sites. You see your most frequent searches. You see all of your recent bookmarks and you also see tabs that you’ve recently closed which is I think it’s a cool feature because like if I want to go back to my Gmail inbox. I can just click it and it automatically opens it. So it kind of like thinking that it had for you. You had this tab open before. You might want to open it again. So this is the first section on tabs, I’ll talk about some dynamic tabs in the next segment and that’s all there is to it.
And in this segment I'm going to finish up talking about how Google Chrome handles tabs and also the last one I talked about how you could move tabs around in Chrome but in this segment I'm going to talk about how tabs can be dynamic in Chrome.
So you see here I have Google Chrome open up on my desktop. I have two tabs open, Tucows and Butterscotch.com. Now, if I will click on the tab and drag it, it separates and now it becomes its own web browser. If I want I can click plus over here and I can open up another site. I can go back to the original and like I open up another site there.
In this case you have an amazing amount of flexibility because you can move things out of one browser and ends to another. So it’s great for like lumping sites that have things in common together on the fly as you're moving along without having things get cluttered. And if you want when you’re done you can drag a tab from there. Drag the tab from here and your extra browsers gone. So these are dynamic tabs. I think it is a fascinating feature in Google Chrome and that concludes part seven.
Now in this segment I am going to take a brief look at Google Chrome’s incognito mode. So with Chrome opened I'm going to click on the wrench icon, move the mouse down to new incognito window and you see this new window comes up. It has got a different color. It’s got a shady little fellow with the sunglasses and a half on in the corner and it tells you quite curly right here that on this page not the original one that you created it from but on this page you're incognito.
So the pages you view on this page don’t appear on your browser history or your search history. It doesn’t leave traces like cookies. Now when you close them everything is gone. However if you download files or create bookmarks they will be preserved. So to give you an example so you can see I am going to take you to a site we have not gone to before. I will go one of my websites, DRFF.com. Now to give you an example I’m going to bookmark this page, say close. Now I am going to close the incognito window. Now I am back here in my original browser. If I will click here and look at the history, recently closed tabs, you do not see DRFF.com at all but because I bookmark it, you do see the bookmark.
So it should be very clear that in incognito mode you can go to pages and it will not keep the history. It will not keep cookies. It will keep the URL in the browser once you’ve close the incognito mode but if you make any bookmarks or downloaded any files those will be preserved. So that’s incognito mode and that concludes part eight.
Now in this segment I'm going to talk to you about keyboard shortcuts. Now it has been my personal feeling that often one of the things that separates more experienced user from newer users is the fact that experienced users tend to use keyboard shortcuts and nearly all programs have keyboard shortcuts.
The keyboard shortcuts do is let you do things right from the keyboards instead of having to move the mouse all away across the screen. Click on something and select something. So as an example in Google Chrome, I can do control T and that means holding down the control T and pressing T and I get a new tab. Many shortcuts tend to be mnemonic which means that they are designed to try to trigger something in your mind to help remember.
So if I want a new window, new control N and I have a new window. Control-shift-N gives me a new incognito window. Control H gives me a history. Control J gives me my download window and if you want a listing of the available keyboard shortcuts. You can look right here under the wrench menu and there they’re listed for you and there are others that aren’t listed here that you can find on Google Chromes site. So keyboard shortcuts are great way to help you to work faster and easier and that concludes part nine.
Now in this last segment of our series, I want to look at the ability of Google Chrome to have controlled crashes. You see I have got Chrome opened on my desktop. I've got three tabs open and if I move my mouse cursor up here at the top and right click, move down. You will see something you will not see in any other browser task manager. Click that and Google Chrome task manager comes up. If I highlight this, the browser itself shows how much memory it is using in K, how many CPU cycles and it also shows the same information for each tab and also for any plugins that are being used.
Now if for example you have a tab that was having problems rather than have to close down the whole browser. You could highlight that tab and click in process just like you would in windows task manager and it would close that tab and leave the other tabs intact.
Another feature that you can access from here is “Stats for Nerds” as they call it and what that does is it shows you some interesting information about the browser, the memory it uses whether it shared, its total, how much a virtual memory and how much its map, that of what’s interest to most lay people but it’s very handy to programmers.
So Google Chrome has this unique ability to act much like an operating system by having a task manager that actually lets you control the individual tabs as if they were individual programs. So that’s controlled crashes in Google Chrome and that concludes our 10 part series.
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