I was hunting for a way to use my Google Bookmarks with Chrome when I ran into a couple of cool Google Chrome tricks and a couple of things I really don’t like about Chrome.
First off, I learned that Google didn’t build in support for very many of it’s own features. I’m not sure if they just wanted to avoid the accusations that they just built a browser to promote their own products, or they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. In any case, I use quite a few of Google’s offerings, so I would like them more integrated into Chrome.
1. There is no way to sync the Google Chrome bookmarks with Google Bookmarks. This kinda stinks because I don’t ever use browser bookmarks. Bookmarks belong on the cloud, so I have all of mine stored with Google. So, Google, please eliminate the “in browser bookmarks” and let me have easy access to my bookmarks stored on the cloud.
You can still add bookmarks to Google Bookmarks withing Chrome. You have to select “always show bookmarks tab” from the little wrench icon in the upper right corner of the browser, or you can just hit “ctrl-b”. Then you have to drag the Google Chrome bookmarklet to the browser bar (You can find the bookmarklet here). Any time you visit a webpage that you want to save to your Google Bookmarks page, simply click the bookmarklet in the bookmarks bar.
2. I HATE the backspace button being used as a shortcut for the “Back” button to go the previous page in the browser history. I have navigated backwards in my browser SEVERAL times when I was just trying to delete the text in a form field.
3. Have you ever closed a tab by accident? I’ve done it several times, usually while cleaning up the browser space and getting rid of the dozens of tabs I’ve opened throughout the day. Here’s the fix, just press Ctrl+Shift+T to open the last closed tab, or open a new tab and check the “Recently closed tabs” section on the right side of the page.
4. If you ever need more space in a text area, you can resize it by grabbing and dragging the lower right corner of the text box. I find this really useful when you’re blogging. The text box in blog tools never seems to be the right size, so you can easily grab it and make it bigger or smaller. I really enjoy this one, and am actually making use of it RIGHT now while authoring the post.
5. Interested in using Chrome, but you don’t want to be all “look at my Google browser.” Then check out Chromium, Google’s open-source version of the browser. Google is either very sincere in helping the open-source browser project movement to help “move the web forward,” or at least they want to make you believe they are. Anyway, check out the Chromium homepage here, or click here to see the latest snapshots for windows to install it. You’ll probably want the directory closest to the top of the page, and download mini_installer.exe to install it. Enjoy having a browser that lacks Google branding, or jump in an help make the internet a better place to surf. Be wary, the open-source browser may be less stable than the Google Chrome version.
6. In Firefox you can drag tabs from one browser session to another. This was pretty cool, but I always wanted to drag a tab right out of the browser into it’s own browser session. Well, you can’t do it with Firefox, but you can with Google Chrome. I’m a browser spawning fool, and I love it.