When reading the last tip about restoring closed tabs, you might have wondered if you can just get the browser to always start up where you left off. This would save you the trouble of re-opening your windows and tabs manually.
It turns out you can do this easily. Open the Tools menu and select "Options" (or, if you're using a Mac, open "Preferences") and go to the "Basics" tab. The first section on the first page of options is called "On startup:", and in there you'll see an option to "Reopen the pages that were open last". Once you select this, Google Chrome will start up showing the same pages that were open when you shut down.
There is one caveat here. Normally, only the most recent window you were using is restored when you restart. If you have more than one window you want to restore, make sure you use the "Exit" choice in the Tools menu (on Mac: "Chrome" > "Quit Google Chrome") to shut down all your windows at once, instead of closing them one at a time. (Of course, as covered in the last tip, you can always restore the other window(s) manually if you forget to exit!)
Finally, if the browser ever crashes, the next time you start up you'll have the option at the top of your window to restore your previous windows and tabs, even if you haven't changed what appears on startup.
Whether you're catching up on your favorite Arabic gameshow, getting up to speed on the latest Korean mobile gadgetry, or researching the local perspective for a dream trip to Machu Picchu, we're all constantly reminded that the internet is an amazingly multilingual place. The Google Chrome team is excited to introduce a new beta feature to help our users navigate the multilingual web: instant machine translation of webpages, without the need for any browser extensions or plug-ins.
How does it work? When the language of the webpage you're viewing is different from your preferred language setting, Chrome will display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate.
Here's a demo of the translation feature by Jay Civelli, one of the engineers who developed it:
For more on how automatic translation in Chrome works, read on in our Help Center article. We hope that the development of online translation tools like this one will help make all the world's information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way – imagine reading a diversity of foreign language news sources in your mother tongue, or easily conducting online commerce across borders and languages.
With today's beta release, we're also excited to introduce new features that will give you even greater choice and control over your privacy as you browse the web. We realize that many users have questions about privacy in browsers, so we've produced a short video to help users better understand privacy in the browser:
In addition to Chrome's existing incognito mode – a handy way to browse the web without leaving traces of website visits on your computer or downloads in your browser history – you can now manage your privacy settings in the new "Privacy" section of Chrome's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites. You can read more about these features, or watch videos explaining how your privacy is handled in Chrome's various features including search and suggestions, browser cookies, Safe Browsing technology, and automatic security updates.
Try out all these new features for yourself in today's beta release. For those of you already on the beta channel, you'll soon be updated automatically. And for those of you on the stable channel, we'll be making Chrome's new translation and privacy features available to you in the coming weeks. Till our next update, auf Wiedersehen!
Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich
If you've ever accidentally closed a tab with something important in it, or shut down the browser only to realize you needed one more bit of information about the webpage you were reading, despair not. Google Chrome remembers the last ten tabs or windows you've closed, and lets you restore them. You can get at these in several ways:
On the bottom of New Tab page, the most recent few are listed in the "Recently closed" section. You can even use this after restarting the browser, in case you accidentally quit with something important open.
If you right-click in the tabstrip, you'll see an option to "Reopen closed tab" or "Reopen closed window", depending on what you last closed. Using this repeatedly goes back through the remembered tabs and windows, from most to least recent.
If keyboard shortcuts suit you more than context menus, just use ctrl-shift-T to reopen a close tab or window.
Since we released Chrome for Mac in beta last December, we've been busy adding new features. Today, after some incubation in the developer channel, we're happy to make some of these features more widely available. The new beta release of Chrome for Mac offers extensions, bookmark sync, and more.
With this new version, you'll be able to install any of over 2,200 extensions (and counting!) currently available in Chrome's extensions gallery. Extensions can add useful, informative, fun, or quirky functionality to the browser. You can manage your extensions by clicking on the Window menu and choosing "Extensions."
For this release, we remained focused on providing a snappy, safe, and simple browsing experience on the Mac. If you haven't tried Chrome on the Mac yet and are curious about its features, this video will take you on a brief tour:
Those of you who use several computers will now be able to keep your bookmarks synchronized between them. If some of your computers aren't Macs, don't worry: bookmark sync works in Chrome for Linux and Windows too. We also added bookmark and cookie managers in a way that feels completely at home on the Mac. For technically-oriented users, our new Task Manager will help you keep tabs on all of your tabs.
If you're not using Chrome yet, you can try all of these new features out by downloading the Google Chrome Beta for Mac. Existing Chrome users should be automatically updated to the new beta within the next day – just check the About window and look for version 5.0.307. We hope you're as excited about this new version as our animated friends are:
Posted by Mark Mentovai, Software Engineer, Google Chrome
When you're using the same browser window to check your email and calendar, write a report, do some research, and watch a few YouTube videos, the tabstrip can become pretty crowded. With Google Chrome, we tried to make it easy to keep your tabs organized.
You can use the mouse to grab a tab and drag it around in the tabstrip, to keep related tabs close to each other.
If you need even better delineation between tasks, just drag a tab out of the strip entirely and drop it somewhere on your desktop. You'll get a whole new window to keep stuff in, and you can then drag more tabs from your old window to your new one.
Didn't mean to create that window? Just drag the tab you dropped back up to the original tabstrip to put it back.
Of course, sometimes you don't want to move tabs, you just want to get rid of them. If you find that highlighting the little "x" that closes a tab is too tricky, you can just point at any part of the tab in the tabstrip and press your mouse's middle button. This makes it just a little easier to go close a tab.
And after you close one tab, the next tab will slide right under your mouse, so if you want to close a bunch, you can just keep clicking.
We're excited to usher in the new year with a bundle of browser goodness for the stable version of Google Chrome. With today's new stable release, all Google Chrome users on PCs can access over 1,500 new features, through our new extension system.
Extensions are little programs, created by developers, which add useful functionality to the browser and to the websites you visit. Some provide you with alerts and notifications, others let you easily access your favorite web services from icons next to your address bar, and there are lots more.
In the video below, I walk through how to install an extension as well as a few that I find useful:
You can find extensions for Google Chrome in our extension gallery, and install the ones that interest you. Extensions on Google Chrome take only seconds to install, and can be uninstalled just as easily. You can view and manage the settings for your extensions by clicking on the Tools menu and selecting "Extensions."
In addition to extensions, another feature that's moving from our beta to the stable channel on the Windows version of Google Chrome is bookmark sync. For those of you who use several computers -- for example, a laptop at work and a desktop at home -- you can now keep your Google Chrome bookmarks synchronized and up-to-date across computers, without needing to manually recreate your bookmarks every time you switch computers. To read more on bookmark sync, check out this handy guide.
For web developers and designers, we're excited to integrate a number of new HTML5 APIs in this stable release, including LocalStorage, Database API, WebSockets, and more. To dive into these features, read on in the Chromium Blog.
Lastly but certainly not the least, we've improved performance (as measured by Mozilla's Dromaeo DOM Core Tests) by 42% over our last stable release and 400% since our first stable release last year.
To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — we're working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).
If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these new features a whirl.
We've already seen a few things you can do with the omnibox, but it turns out there are even more capabilities you might not have known about.
First, you can create a desktop shortcut for the page you're on by simply highlighting the text in the omnibox, and then dragging that text onto your desktop.
If this is too fussy for you, you can drag the Star button next to the omnibox to the desktop to do the same thing (Note: this only applies to Google Chrome for Windows).
Second, if you've gotten a web address in an email or other document, and it isn't actually clickable, you can easily open it in the omnibox. Just select the link (even if it's broken across multiple lines!), copy it to your clipboard, and then right click (or on the Mac, ctrl-click) on the omnibox and select "Paste and go".
This will navigate to the link immediately. It works for things other than links too -- if you have some text on your clipboard, you can "Paste and search" to do the same thing as dragging the text to the omnibox.
