Geek and a Half

September 4th, 2008 by Jake

So by now you’ve all heard about Google’s new browser, but here are some nifty little (and some useless) things that you probably didn’t know about it.

All of these must be typed manually, they cannot be linked to with an <a> tag, as far as I’ve seen.

• The “New Tab” page, the smart page that shows your most visited pages, can be accessed by going to chrome-internal:
• Easter egg: Type about:internets into the Omnibox. The title of the page says “The Tubes are Clogged!”, and the page is supposed to show the old Windows screen saver of the tubes going in various directions, however it doesn’t appear to be working for me on Windows Vista. Google has a great sense of humor nonetheless.
• As of the initial release version, 0.2.149.27, typing the following into the Omnibox will crash Google Chrome: “:%”, no quotes.
• about:stats will produce a page entitled “Shhh! This page is secret!”, and also give you some scripting statistics.
• about:plugins will produce a page showing you plugin information.
• about:version will obviously display information about the browser itself, similar to the About dialog box.
• about:memory is the same as clicking the “Stats for nerds” link in the Chrome Task Manager.
• about:histograms will show connection times.
• about:dns will show lots of DNS info, like precaching and access times.
• about:cache brings up a HUGE list of your Internet cache.
• about:network brings up a menu and a few output windows for various network tests and monitors.
• view-cache:stats brings up what appears to be memory addresses for various things.
• chrome-resource://favicon will display the binary data for a PNG file, presumably a favicon. The code does not change if you visit different websites before or after.

Some of these are more for fun, while others are more for diagnostic purposes. Take of it what you will.

Have your own that isn’t listed here? Let us know in the comments!