#. Disabling Automatic Flash Content Playback
While a lot of websites are now utilizing HTML5 to embed videos in their pages, some sites still prefer flash for multimedia. Chrome allows you to disable flash playbacks so that videos/animations don’t automatically start as soon as you land on those pages. To disable automatic flash playback, head over in the settings. Scroll down to the bottom and click “Show additional settings”. Under privacy, hit the “Content settings” button. Now locate “Plugins” section and check the “Let me choose when to run plugin content” option in there.
Now that, for the most part, works perfectly. But only to make sure, type “about:plugins” in the address bar and press enter. At the end of that page, you’ll find “Adobe flash player”. If “always allowed to run” is checked there, uncheck it as this setting will override the previous one we configured.
#. Generating Almost Uncrackable Codes Using the Password Generation flag.
Google Chrome has a ton of hidden experimental features and one of them is a “Password Generation” utility which basically suggests you passcodes whenever the browser realizes you’re creating a new account. To enable this, go to “chrome://flags/” ( type that in the address bar and enter! ). You will be greeted with a long list of beta features. On top of the page, there’s also a warning message as these settings are not really perfected and can ruin the experience in some cases. But my experience has been stable so far and they will be safe for most of the folks.
To avoid wasting time in finding that flag, press “Ctrl+F” and type in “password generation”. Enable that to get a suggestion every time you’re filling the Signup form. Now, after testing this, you might wonder “how am I going to remember this complicated code?”. Well, that’s the whole point, you have to save it in Chrome so that it can fill in automatically. Basically, Google wants you to stay in Chrome as much as possible and if you start using the password generation tool, chances are you definitely will.
Sure you will have to relaunch Chrome in order for these flags to work.
#. Enabling Smooth Scrolling
One thing I still hate about Chrome is that unlike other browsers, it’s not that great when it comes to smooth scrolling. This is however not a problem on Mac computers but majorly for Linux and Windows users. You can almost fix this through that experimental flags. Locate “Smooth scrolling” and just enable it.
Relaunch the browser and get a whole lot better scrolling especially on lengthy web pages.
#. Option to Resume Downloads
This one is my favorite. Do you ever get frustrated when the internet goes down and you are unable to resume that huge download on Chrome? Well, there’s a solution.
To get an option for resuming downloads, Go to that flags page and find “Download Resumption”, enable that and voila! you now have the option to resume failed or paused downloads. Don’t forget to restart Chrome. However, this won’t work for untrusted sources, only for the websites that allow resuming downloads.
#. Browsing Saved Copies of Websites When Internet is Down
Okay, your internet is down and you want to read that news again you have read half an hour ago. Good news is Chrome saves few of the frequently visited sites/pages in its cache. With this neat little flag feature, you can view the page from Chrome’s temporary memory.
Once Enabled, you will have two choices – The primary one puts the “Show saved copy” button before the reload option and the secondary puts in after that. That’s the only different, nothing else. Next time your internet is not working, you will be able to browse a cached copy of a website that was visited some time back.
These are some of the tweaks we feel make Chrome’s browsing experience more seamless, I hope Google brings these tweaks in the main settings as soon as possible. They are fantastic and work without any hiccups despite being in beta. If for some reason, you’re unable to find those options, make sure Chrome is updated.
