Is the above image quiet familiar for you? Are you amongst those users who regularly use Google Chrome due to the multiple features that it carries yet are frustrated due to its irresponsible behavior with some websites? And, does the below line seems familiar?

Oops! This link appears to be broken in Google Chrome

One way out is referring to the Support Page created by Google. It will ask you to refresh your cache, scan your system for silly malwares, and delete unwanted cookies. But, I am pretty sure that all this just won’t solve your problem. Once you are done experimenting with different Google suggested methods then I will request you to try playing with the internal Google Chrome settings.

See the checkbox inside the bright red oval in the image above? Well, that is the key to unlock your lock. Go to (see image below) Tools > Options (which is Preferences on Mac) > Under The Hood Tab and uncheck the checkbox next to “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance.” This will help Google Chrome load some of the websites that usually aren’t loaded and will also increase the website load time by very few microseconds (which you won’t notice).

Happy Chroming!!

Google Analytics might be a crazy tracking system for some webmasters but those who understand the basics of Google Analytics will be aware of the importance of Google Analytics for their blog/website. Polaris has created an awesome Google Analytics API using which you can enjoy the awesome Google Analytics report on your desktop on the fly. Polaris uses the freely available Adobe AIR so firstly you will have to install Adobe AIR for Polaris to start working.

Download Adobe AIR

Download Polaris

Once you are done downloading and installation of Adobe AIR and Polaris then all you need to do is study your Google Analytics Report from your desktop itself. Double click on the Polaris shortcut and you will be greeted with the medium sized Polaris Window which will ask for some of your details. Do opt for the free version as that is all what you will require. Once you are done with the basic info then you need to enter your Google Analytics login ID and password. Give this final detail and you will be greeted with the Google Analytics report for the very first website that is listed in your Google Analytics login account.

If you have multiple websites in your Google Analytics Login account and you want to get the Google Analytics report for the other website then just click on the currently shown website name as shown by the black arrow in the image above. You will be taken to the list of websites that you have listed in your Google Analytics account.

Select the website that you wish to track and click on select. Voila! You are now tracking another website which is listed in the same Google Analytics Login account. Enjoy the use of the Google Analytics API which will surely eat least time of yours. Lastly, if you have multiple Google Analytics Login accounts then you will have to pay the nominal fee of $15/year so as to use Polaris for multiple Google Analytics Login accounts.

Like firefox you can add any custom search in Google Chrome. Here I will teach you how to add any custom search to Google Chrome and we will take the example of Wikipedia search and Google translate to understand it more clearly. As you can see in the image above, in my Google Chrome when I add wiki in the omnibox then I am asked to press “tab” and then type the search term. Now hit enter and wikipedia search page opens with the results.

Procedure to add custom search to your Google Chrome

Open the website which already has a search box and which provides the search feature. Copy the URL

Like in wikipedia when you search for something in their search bar then you get this URL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=

Next to search= are the keywords which you searched in wikipedia. But you need to delete those keywords and all that is of important is the URL shown above.

Right Click in the omnibox (address bar) and click on ‘Edit search engines’. Now click on ‘Add’ button and then you will be asked to fill three text fields.

In the current example of Wikipedia here is what you have to enter:

Name: Wikipedia
Keyword: wiki (this is what you type in the omnibox so as to search wikipedia)
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s (you need to append %s next to the URL so that Google Chrome could convert that URL to default search engine)

Similarly, for Google Translator here is what you need to enter:

Name: Google Translate (English)
Keyword: translate
URL: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=%s

Now you can repeat the procedure for any website which offers custom search.

Google Chrome tricks have turned out to be very useful for today’s webmaster although similar alternatives are available for FireFox users but the attractive graphical interface of Google Chrome is much better.

If you are a webmaster and you want to scrutinize your website in terms of the size of various images, scripts, objects and their loading times then you can use Google Chrome to get this information with just few clicks.

Open the webpage that you want to analyze, right click on the webpage, click on “Inspect element”, choose “Resources” tab and reload the webpage. This will display all the details related to that webpage. You can sort the details using loading time or size of scripts / images.

Similar to FireFox, Google chrome also has many about:internets easter eggs which can provide you better control over your Google Chrome installation. Here I have listed all the Google Chrome easter eggs which might be of your help and will keep updating the post as I come to know about more of these.

All you need to do is type about:<easter egg name> and hit enter. Let me list all those that I could collect. Thanks to Techzilo for the inspiration.

about:crash

Well, it won’t help you recover from crash but it actually will crash Google Chrome. Once you type this and hit enter then you will be greeted with the Google Chrome ’sad tab’ image shown below.

about:internets

This isn’t of any real use and it just displays the famous pipes screensaver of windows. See the image below.

about:hang

Well, this is the easter egg that will actually help you recognize the tab which is creating problems and later on close it.

about:dns

This will make Google Chrome prefetch the DNS records for 10 hostnames which are frequently being visited.

about:network

Type this in omnibox, hit enter, click on “Start I/O tacking” and then open a new website in another tab. You will see the links to all images, objects, scripts etc. of that website in this about:network omnibox.

about:memory

This will help you compare the memory being used by various browsers that are open at that time and compare that memory use with that of Google Chrome

about:plugins

This is used to know more about the plugins that are installed with Google Chrome. With plugins I mean flash player, real player etc. and not the extensions which are installed firefox.

about:stats

Every minute detail which is running with Google Chrome is displayed with this page.

about:histograms

This will list many histograms that which reveal the internal working of Google Chrome.

about:cache

This will list the sites that have been cached by Google Chrome.

about:version

You guessed it right. It displays the current version of Google Chrome. Remember to check for latest Google Chrome builds using this small app.

And you can get a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts for Google Chrome over here.