Thursday, November 17, 2011

Google Operating System

Google Chrome's about: Pages

Like most other browsers, Google Chrome has some special pages that show information about memory usage, cached files, plug-ins and more. Here's a list of the most interesting about: pages available in Google Chrome (you can open them by dragging about:name to the address bar).

1. about:version - Google Chrome shows the version number the browser, WebKit and V8 (JavaScript engine). You can also find the user-agent used by Google Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19


2. about:plugins - the list of plug-ins that are available in Google Chrome: Shockwave Flash, RealPlayer etc.

3. about:cache - a list of all the web pages cached by Google Chrome. The browser doesn't have an option to limit the cache's size, so it's recommended to regularly empty the cache.

4. about:memory - this pages compares the memory used by all the active browsers and by Google Chrome's tabs.


5. about:stats - a list of internal counters and timers that has a funny subtitle "Shhh! This page is secret!".


6. about:histograms - a list of histograms for Google Chrome's internal metrics.


7. about:dns - Google Chrome prefetches the DNS records for 10 frequently visited hostnames. This feature can be disabled in Options > Under the Hood by unchecking "Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance".

8. about:network - this page could be used for I/O tracking and it's a partial replacement for the Live HTTP Headers extension. Click on "Start I/O tracking", open a web page in a new tab and you'll get a list of all the images, scripts and objects loaded from that web page.

9. about:crash - crash the active tab. Google Chrome displays the "sad tab" image, followed by this message: "Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, press Reload or go to another page".


10. about:hang - type this in the address bar of a tab when there's already an active web page to hang the process (this means that the process no longer accepts any signal, but it's still running). The other tabs will continue to work and the active tab can be closed.

11. about:internets - this is an Easter egg that references two popular Internet memes: Internets and Series of tubes. Google Chrome embeds the 3D Pipes screensaver from Windows, so you'll see it only if you have the file sspipes.scr in C:\Windows\System32.

No comments:

Post a Comment