Five Google Chrome Tricks to Make Your Life Easier

published by Mike Neumire on 3/17/2023

Google Chrome contains many hidden tricks and tools that you can take advantage of to keep your digital life manageable and reduce the number of clicks you make. Here are five tips for navigating Google Chrome. 

Multiple Profiles

Google Chrome allows you to set up multiple profiles to make it easier to keep your accounts, passwords, history, etc. separate. This is incredibly useful if you find yourself switching between email accounts often. There is also a guest option that you can launch quickly if you’re letting someone else use your computer. You can even change the color themes for each profile to make it super easy to determine which profile you’re in. 

"Search Google for"

If you’re reading something on a webpage that you want to research further, you can be efficient by selecting the text, right clicking and choosing “search google for…” which will automatically plug that text into a google search bar in a new tab. This is a great example of working smarter, not harder! 

Search Image with Google

Right clicking on any image on a webpage will give you an option called “search image with google '' which will pull that image and search it in Google Lens. The results you get will be the web hits with the closest visual matches to that image. This is a great resource for developing students as critical thinkers who can now see if a web page is using an image that is being used elsewhere, and if so, where it may have originated. It can also help find other images that are close visual matches to complete a project. 

copy link to highlight

“Copy link to highlight” is an incredible way to call attention to a specific part of an article or website. When you find some important or useful information on a webpage, you can select that text and right click to find “copy link to highlight” in the context menu. When others click the link that you’ve created, they won’t have to scroll and search through miles of text to find the key idea that you want them to see. It will jump them right to the exact point in the text you want them to see. 

tab organization

It is so easy to let browser tabs collect, clutter, and leave our browsers disorganized. Google chrome has a few efficiency tricks to help us avoid getting to that point. Let’s say you want to categorize and split your tabs into different windows, so that when you navigate to that window, you can focus on one task. Chrome allows you to select multiple tabs at once. You can simply hold down the control key and then select all the tabs for the task you need to focus on. If you already have a new window of tabs for that task, and need to move over some other tabs, you can right click one of the tabs you selected, find “move tabs to another window” in the context menu, and then select the window where you want those tabs to be taken. Let’s say you went down a tangential rabbit hole, and you want to get rid of some distracting tabs. A shortcut for this is to right click on a tab you want to keep and then choose “close tabs to the right” from the context menu. Every tab you have open to the right of that tab will close. If you do tend to open so many tabs that you can’t even see what they are anymore, you may wish to take advantage of the “pin tab” option, which will anchor whichever tab you choose to the very left of your window so that you can always find it. If you’ve already lost a tab you need in your see of other tabs, you can always use the “search tabs” bar to type in the name of the website or article you’re looking for. Finally, if you have tabs that are playing sounds, you can choose to individually mute those tabs, instead of muting your whole computer.