52 Google Chrome Tips and Tricks

Short answer: the fastest wins in Chrome today are Split View (right-click a tab → Add tab to new split view), vertical tabs (right-click empty tab-strip space → Show tabs vertically), tab search (Ctrl+Shift+A / Cmd+Shift+A), the @tabs, @bookmarks and @history shortcuts in the address bar, and Memory Saver under Settings → Performance. Everything else below builds on those five.

This list has lived on Chrome Story since 2019, and it gets rewritten as Chrome changes. This is the 2026 edition, checked against Chrome 151 on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android. Tips that stopped working — the old cache: operator, the data-URL notepad trick, the downloads bar — have been cut and replaced with things that actually work now.

Before you start

• You’re on Chrome 120 or newer. Check at chrome://settings/help — Chrome updates itself while you’re there.
• You’re signed in to Chrome with a Google account. About a dozen of these tips depend on sync.
• Windows/ChromeOS users press Ctrl where macOS users press Cmd, unless a tip says otherwise.

Tabs and windows

1. Put two tabs side by side with Split View

Chrome now splits a single window into two panes — no extension, no dragging windows around. Right-click a tab and choose Add tab to new split view, then pick the second page. Drag the divider to change the ratio. Close the split from the same right-click menu.

This is the single biggest quality-of-life change in recent Chrome. Reference doc on the left, the thing you’re writing on the right.

2. Switch the tab strip to vertical

If you routinely run 30 tabs, horizontal tabs are useless — every favicon looks the same. Right-click empty space on the tab strip and choose Show tabs vertically, or go to Settings → Appearance → Tab position. Tabs move to a collapsible sidebar where you can read the actual page titles. Collapse it to a thin icon rail when you need the screen width back.

3. Find any open tab with Ctrl+Shift+A

Press Ctrl+Shift+A (Cmd+Shift+A on Mac) to open tab search. It matches on title and URL and also lists recently closed tabs, so it doubles as an undo. You can also click the small chevron at the end of the tab strip.

One caveat worth knowing: matching is plain substring, not fuzzy. Typing “fig han” won’t find “Figma Handoff” — type a continuous chunk of the title.

4. Group tabs, then save the group

Right-click a tab → Add tab to new group, name it, give it a colour. Click the group name to collapse the whole set into a single coloured pill.

The part people miss: right-click the group name and turn on Save group. It syncs to your other devices and reappears in the bookmarks bar, so a research session survives a browser restart — and a laptop swap.

5. Pin the tabs you never close

Right-click a tab → Pin. It shrinks to a favicon, locks to the far left, loses its close button (so you can’t kill it by accident), and comes back automatically the next time you open Chrome.

6. Undo a closed tab — up to ten times

Ctrl+Shift+T reopens the last tab you closed. Keep pressing it and Chrome keeps walking backwards through your recently closed tabs, and eventually through whole closed windows.

7. Middle-click to close, middle-click to open

Middle-clicking (pressing the scroll wheel) a tab closes it. Middle-clicking a link opens it in a background tab. Two clicks that replace a lot of menu hunting.

8. Drag tabs out — several at a time

Drag any tab away from the strip to pop it into its own window, and drag it back to re-merge. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) to select several tabs first, then move them all together.

9. Send a tab to your phone

Right-click a tab (or click the share icon in the address bar) and choose Send to your devices. The page arrives as a notification on any device signed into the same Google account. Far quicker than emailing yourself a link.

10. Pick up tabs from another device

Open chrome://history (Ctrl+H) and look at Tabs from other devices in the sidebar. On Android, tap the three-dot menu → Recent tabs. Everything you left open on the other machine is listed there.

11. Ctrl+click and Shift+click links

Ctrl+click a link to open it in a background tab and keep reading. Ctrl+Shift+click opens it in a new tab and jumps to it. Shift+click opens it in a whole new window.

The address bar (omnibox)

12. Search your tabs, bookmarks and history with @

Type @tabs, @bookmarks or @history in the address bar, press Space, then type your query. Chrome switches into a dedicated search mode for just that source instead of mixing everything together. @gemini sends the query straight to Gemini.

If you only learn one thing from this list, make it this one. It replaces about four separate settings pages.

13. Use Chrome Actions to jump into settings

Type what you want to do rather than hunting for it: clear browsing data, manage passwords, update chrome, manage extensions, incognito. Chrome offers a button that takes you straight there.

14. Set up site search shortcuts

Go to Settings → Search engine → Site search and add a shortcut — say yt for YouTube or wiki for Wikipedia. Now typing yt then Tab then your query searches that site directly from the address bar.

Chrome also learns some of these on its own: visit a site with a search box a few times and you can often just type its name and press Tab.

15. Paste and go, paste and search

Copy a URL, right-click the address bar, choose Paste and go — it pastes and loads in one step. Copy plain text instead and the same menu offers Paste and search.

16. Do maths and conversions without leaving the bar

Type 1024*7, or 15 miles in km, or 40 usd in inr into the address bar. The answer appears in the dropdown before you press Enter.

17. Drag selected text to the address bar

Highlight text anywhere and drag it onto the address bar to search for it. Drag it onto the empty area of the tab strip instead and the search opens in a new tab.

18. Alt+Enter opens the address bar in a new tab

Type a URL or a search, then press Alt+Enter instead of Enter. Your current page stays put and the new one opens beside it.

19. Edit search engines from a right-click

Right-click inside the address bar and pick Manage search engines and site search to change your default or clean out engines Chrome picked up on its own.

20. Use the Wayback Machine, not cache:

Google retired the cache: operator in 2024 and removed cached links from search results, so the old tip no longer works. To see an older version of a page, use web.archive.org — or click the three dots beside a Google result and look under More about this page, where Google now links to the Internet Archive directly.

Speed and memory

21. Turn on Memory Saver

Settings → Performance → Memory Saver. Chrome puts tabs you haven’t touched in a while to sleep and frees their RAM; they reload instantly when you click back. Hover an inactive tab and Chrome tells you how much memory it recovered.

Add exceptions for anything that must stay live — a music player, a dashboard, a web chat — under Always keep these sites active.

22. Turn on Energy Saver on a laptop

Same Performance page. Chrome dials back background activity and some visual effects when the battery drops below 20%, or whenever you’re unplugged, depending on which option you pick.

23. Find the tab that’s eating your CPU

Chrome has its own task manager listing every tab and extension with its memory and CPU use. Open it with Shift+Esc on Windows and Linux, or Search+Esc on a Chromebook.

On macOS there’s no default shortcut — go to the Window menu → Task Manager, or the three-dot menu → More tools → Task Manager. Sort by Memory, find the offender, hit End process.

24. Let Chrome preload pages

Settings → Performance → Preload pages. Chrome fetches pages it thinks you’re about to open so they appear instantly. “Standard preloading” is the sensible middle ground; “Extended” is faster but sends more of your browsing to Google.

25. Browse chrome://flags carefully

chrome://flags is the experiments drawer — unfinished features that ship early for testing. Some are genuinely useful months before launch. Some will break your browser.

Change one flag at a time so you know what to blame, and note that Google removes flags without warning between versions.

26. Check Chrome Labs first

Before diving into flags, look for the small beaker icon near the address bar. Chrome Labs is a curated shortlist of experiments Google considers safe enough to recommend — the same idea as flags, with the sharp edges filed off.

Reading and focus

27. Strip a page down with Reading Mode

Right-click a page and choose Open in reading mode (or Alt+Shift+R on Windows/ChromeOS, Cmd+Option+R on Mac). The article opens in the side panel with the ads, popups and sidebars gone, and you can change the font, size, spacing and theme.

28. Save pages to the Reading List

Click the bookmark star and choose Add to reading list, or use the side panel. Unlike bookmarks, the reading list tracks what you’ve read and syncs across devices — a proper “later” pile rather than a permanent archive.

29. Link to an exact sentence

Select some text on a page, right-click, and choose Copy link to highlight. Anyone who opens that link lands on the page with your sentence highlighted and scrolled into view. Perfect for “look at this specific paragraph” messages.

30. Zoom — and make it stick per site

Ctrl and + to zoom in, Ctrl and − to zoom out, Ctrl+0 to reset. Chrome remembers the level per site, so one adjustment fixes that one badly-designed page forever. Set a global default under Settings → Appearance → Page zoom.

31. Turn on Live Caption

Settings → Accessibility → Live Caption. Chrome generates real-time captions for any audio or video playing in the browser, including videos with no captions of their own. It runs on your device, and it’s as useful in a noisy room as it is for accessibility.

32. Hold the back button for a tab’s full history

Click and hold the back (or forward) arrow to see every page visited in that tab, then jump straight to the one you want instead of clicking back nine times.

AI features in Chrome

33. Open the Gemini side panel

Click the Gemini icon at the top right to open the side panel. It can see the page you’re on, so you can ask it to summarise a long article, pull the key numbers out of a report, or explain a dense paragraph — without copy-pasting anything. The side panel, page summaries and Nano Banana image editing are available on the free tier.

34. Ask Gemini about a whole tab group

Right-click a tab group and choose Ask Gemini about this group. Gemini reads every tab in the group at once, which is what you want when you have eight hotel listings or six product reviews open and need them compared. The panel updates live as you add or remove tabs.

35. Know what auto browse costs

Auto browse lets Gemini click through a site and carry out a multi-step task for you. It is not a free feature — it requires a Google AI Pro or AI Ultra subscription, with a daily cap on tasks. Worth knowing before you go looking for a button that isn’t there on the free tier.

36. Search inside any image with Lens

Right-click any image and pick Search with Google Lens. You can also drag a box around part of the screen to identify an object, translate text inside a screenshot, or copy text out of a picture.

37. Gemini is in Chrome for Android too

Chrome for Android now carries the same Gemini integration on supported devices — currently US users on Android 12 or newer with at least 4GB of RAM. Same page-summarising behaviour, on the phone.

Privacy and security

38. Run Safety Check

Settings → Privacy and security → Safety Check. One button audits your saved passwords against known breaches, flags harmful extensions, and confirms Chrome is current and Safe Browsing is on. Chrome now runs the password portion quietly in the background and raises a badge on the three-dot menu if it finds something.

39. Switch to Enhanced Safe Browsing

Settings → Privacy and security → Security. Enhanced protection checks sites and downloads against Google’s live threat data rather than a locally cached list, which catches brand-new phishing pages that Standard protection misses. The trade-off is that more browsing data goes to Google — read the description and decide for yourself.

40. Force HTTPS everywhere

On the same Security page, turn on Always use secure connections. Chrome upgrades every request to HTTPS and warns you before loading anything that’s still plain HTTP.

41. Walk through Privacy Guide

Settings → Privacy and security → Privacy Guide steps you through history sync, cookies, Safe Browsing and ad privacy one screen at a time, explaining each. While you’re there, check Ad privacy — that’s where Chrome lists the interest topics it has inferred about you, and where you can delete them.

42. Open Password Manager as its own app

Go to chrome://password-manager, then use the install icon in the address bar to add it to your desktop or taskbar. It behaves like a standalone app. Inside, Checkup lists every password that’s been breached, reused, or is simply too weak.

43. Fix a misbehaving site from the padlock

Click the icon at the left of the address bar → Site settings to control camera, microphone, location, notifications, pop-ups and JavaScript for that one site. This is the fastest way to kill notification spam from a single site without disabling notifications everywhere.

44. Incognito, properly understood

Ctrl+Shift+N opens an Incognito window. It stops Chrome saving history, cookies and form data on this device. It does not hide you from your employer, your ISP, or the sites you visit. Chrome blocks third-party cookies in Incognito by default.

Use it for shared computers and for logging into a second account — not as an anonymity tool.

45. Separate work and personal with Profiles

Click your avatar → Add to create a profile with its own bookmarks, history, extensions, passwords and sign-in. Each one gets its own window and taskbar icon. Guest mode in the same menu is the right choice when someone borrows your laptop for five minutes.

Downloads, PDFs and files

46. Use the download bubble

Chrome replaced the old bottom downloads bar with a bubble on the toolbar. Click the download arrow to see recent files, and drag a file straight out of that list into a folder, an email, or a web upload box — no need to open the Downloads folder at all.

47. Turn anything into a PDF — and strip a PDF password

Press Ctrl+P and set the destination to Save as PDF. Any web page becomes a PDF. The same trick works on a password-protected PDF you can already open: print it to PDF and the copy comes out without the password.

48. Annotate and rotate PDFs in Chrome

Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer can highlight text, draw, and add annotations from the toolbar at the top of the document. Rotation lives in the same toolbar — and in the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+], which use Ctrl on macOS too, not Cmd.

49. Drop files onto Chrome to open them

Drag a PDF, image, text file or HTML file from your desktop onto the Chrome tab strip and it opens in a new tab. Handy when you don’t want to wait for a heavyweight app to launch.

Chrome on your phone

50. Move the address bar to the bottom

On Chrome for Android, long-press the address bar and choose Move address bar to bottom, or find the option in Settings → Address bar. On iPhone it’s under Settings → Address bar as well. On a big phone this is the difference between one-handed and two-handed browsing.

51. Swipe the address bar to change tabs

Swipe left or right on the address bar itself to move between open tabs. Swipe down on it to open the tab switcher. Both are far quicker than tapping the tab counter.

52. Install a site as an app

Three-dot menu → Add to Home screen on mobile, or the install icon in the address bar on desktop. Supported sites install as standalone apps with their own window and icon — no browser chrome, no tab to lose.

Keyboard shortcuts worth memorising

Useful chrome:// pages

Tips that no longer work

Older versions of this article — and plenty of lists still circulating — recommend these. They’re dead, and it’s worth knowing why:

• cache:example.com — Google retired the cache operator in 2024. Use the Wayback Machine (tip 20).
• data:text/html, <html contenteditable> as a notepad — Chrome blocks typing data: URLs into the address bar for security reasons. Use a scratchpad extension or Google Keep instead.
• Dragging from the downloads bar — the bar is gone; the download bubble does the same job (tip 46).
• Ctrl+Shift+E for tab search — never a real Chrome shortcut. It’s Ctrl+Shift+A.
• Cmd+Esc for the Mac task manager — not a Chrome shortcut either. Use the Window menu (tip 23).

Frequently asked questions

How do I split the screen in Chrome without an extension?

Right-click any tab and choose Add tab to new split view, then pick the second page. Chrome shows both tabs side by side in one window and merges their tabs at the top. Drag the divider to resize.

Does Chrome still have a hidden dinosaur game?

Yes. Type chrome://dino in the address bar to play it while you’re online. Press Space to jump.

Why does Chrome use so much memory?

Chrome runs each tab and extension in its own process, which improves stability and security but costs RAM. Turn on Memory Saver under Settings → Performance to have Chrome sleep inactive tabs, and use Shift+Esc to find the specific tab or extension responsible.

Is Gemini in Chrome free?

Partly. The Gemini side panel, page summaries and Nano Banana image editing work on the free tier. Auto browse, where Gemini carries out multi-step tasks on a site for you, requires a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription.

How do I get my tabs back after Chrome closes?

Press Ctrl+Shift+T repeatedly — it walks back through closed tabs and then closed windows. To make it permanent, go to Settings → On startup and choose Continue where you left off.

Do these tips work on a Chromebook?

Almost all of them. The main difference is the Task Manager, which is Search+Esc on ChromeOS, and clearing browsing data, which is Ctrl+Shift+Backspace.

Keep going

• Google Chrome Incognito Mode: The Complete Guide
• How to Enable and Use Tab Groups
• How to Clear Cache in Google Chrome
• How to View Saved Passwords in Chrome
• 50 Chromebook Tips and Tricks
• 13 Microsoft Edge Tips and Tricks

Got a tip that belongs on this list? Leave it in the comments. This article is rewritten as Chrome changes — last verified against Chrome 151 in July 2026.