To get to the Menu on Google Chrome browser, click on the “Wrench” icon on the top right-hand corner. From here you can access certain browser features.
However, there are several features that are not available from the Menu, which you can access only using the chrome:// commands. Some of the features are available under both Menu and chrome:// commands.
Following are the 12 most helpful chrome:// commands that you should know.
1. chrome://flags
From here you can enable some of the experimental features that are hidden in the google Chrome browser. Please note that as mentioned on this page, since these are experimental, these might not work as expected and might cause issues. Enable these features and use it at your own risk.
2. chrome://dns
This displays the list of hostnames for which the browser will prefetch the DNS records.
3. chrome://downloads
This is also available from the Menu -> Downloads. Short cut key is Ctrl+J
4. chrome://extensions
This is also available from the Menu -> Tools -> Extensions
5. chrome://bookmarks
This is also available from the Menu -> Bookmarks -> Bookmark Manager. Short cut key is Ctrl+Shift+O
6. chrome://history
This is also availble from the Menu -> History. Short cut key is Ctrl+H
7. chrome://memory
This will redirect to “chrome://memory-redirect/”. This will display the memory used by Google chrome browser, and all other browsers running on the system (including firefox).
This also display all the process related to browser with their PID, process name, and the memory it takes.
8. chrome://net-internals
This displays all networking related information. Use this to capture network events generated by the browser. You can also export this data. You can view DNS host resolver cache.
One of the important feature in this feature is “Test”. If a URL failed to load, you can go to “chrome://net-internals” -> click on “Tests” tab -> type that URL which failed, and click on “Start Test”, which will do some test and report you why that URL failed.
chrome://plugins/
chrome://plugins/
9. chrome://quota-internals
This gives information about the disk space quote used by the browser, including the break down of how much space the individual websites took under temporary files.
10. chrome://sessions
This displays the number of sessions and magic list that are currently running.
11. chrome://settings
This is also available from the Menu -> Options (on Windows), and Menu -> Preferences (on Linux). From here you can control various browser related settings.
12. chrome://sync-internals
This gives information about the chrome sync feature, including the Sync URL used by google, and sync statistics.
Finally, to view all the available chrome:// commands, type chrome://about/ in your chrome browser URL as shown below.
Also, please note that all of the commands mentioned above can also be called using google chrome about command, which redirects to chrome://.
For example, both of the following are exactly the same.
about:dns chrome://dns
