How to Access New Features in Chrome 85 Without Waiting for Deployment
As a kid on [a holiday of your choice], Chrome 85 went mainstream yesterday. Or at least in theory. When I launched my browser yesterday afternoon and followed my typical ritual of going to his About Google Chrome to trigger the update, nothing happened.
HM. Perhaps Google’s proposal for mass roll-out of Chrome 85 was much more delayed than I expected. I can only hope you have access to Chrome 85 today – if not, you can download and install the latest version using the google installer . It won’t ruin your browsing experience at all, and will help you upgrade to Chrome 85 if you don’t already have it.
And once you’ve done that, here are all the features worth knowing about and ways to unlock them so you don’t have to wait for their official launch.
View (and possibly disable) thumbnails of the tabs
Hover over any tab in Chrome 85 and you will see a pop-up thumbnail showing what the website looks like. Because, you know, this is a thumbnail – a tiny preview.
If you hate them, just raise chrome://flags in the address bar and disable the # tab-hover-cards flag, which will make your hover more boring:
Load web pages faster and use fewer system resources
Good news: Chrome 85 already loads pages 10 percent faster than previous versions of Chrome, and you don’t need to do anything to benefit from these improvements. This is all thanks to Profile Guided Optimization, an optimization technique that you can read more about here . And yes, that “ten percent” figure comes directly from Google; I haven’t tested it myself, but of course it’s curious.
Chrome is also launching tab throttling, but so far only in the beta channel . This battery and resource saving behavior that we tested for Chrome Canary last month will eventually become the default in Chrome. In the meantime, you will need to unblock it in the beta version of Chrome by enabling the # intensive-wake-throttling flag in chrome://flags
Expand and collapse tab groups
Tab groups have been in Chrome for a while, but now you can expand and shrink your tab groups just by clicking the group name (or color if you don’t like the words). Bring up chrome://flags and enable this flag to enable this feature: # tab-groups-collapse. I love it.
Pay more attention to the tabs you already have
This is not a feature that you need to enable in the browser, but it needs to be mentally enabled as part of your address bar routine. This is what I mean. Now, when you enter a website, Chrome will tell you if that website is open somewhere in an existing tab group. It’s not very useful if you keep your browser clean and tidy, but for people who deal with a lot of tabs, myself included, this feature is great. Starting with Chrome 85 release, it is now available for Android as well.
I have an ultra-wide monitor, so it’s easy to skip this little option on the right side of the browser. Look for this whenever you enter a web address:
Click on it and you will be taken to a tab that already has the website you are trying to open. This option should be a lot more obvious on Android as, as you know, your screen is much narrower.
Save the .PDF forms you filled out in Chrome.
Right now, if you enter data into a .PDF in Chrome and try to save what you did, the file that will be saved to your computer will not contain anything you entered. This changes in Chrome 85, but the feature is, as always, a deployment.
You will soon be able to fill out .PDF forms and save the original or completed PDF in Chrome, but if you’re impatient, you can access this feature today. Download chrome://flags and enable the # pdf-form-save flag. And while you’re there, also include the # export-tagged-pdf flag, which adds additional metadata about the .PDF structure (better for accessibility) to the files being saved.
Create QR Codes for Website Sharing
If you go to chrome://flags and enable # sharing-qr-code-generator , you can now right click in the body of any website and generate a QR code that can then be shared with others, print on the storefront , hang on the wall and so on.
Anonymize your browser’s user agent string
If you prefer websites to be unaware of the browser and operating system you are using – in an attempt to limit the amount of data you share with anyone – you can enable # freeze-user-agent in chrome://flags/ to give your browser a little more control over what it shares, instead of transmitting all sorts of information to whatever site it visits (for easier fingerprinting ).