Use These Apps to Make Windows 10 Look Like a Chromebook
Nothing against Windows 10, but if you want to simplify it a bit by giving it a Chromebook approach – tweak various settings and UI elements to make them easier to work with, or simply integrate some of the most useful Chromebook features directly into Windows itself. yourself 10 – no one is going to upset you. This is your computer, you can do whatever you want with it .
Michael Perrigo of Chrome Unboxed has a great guide on how to bring the best features of Chrome OS to Windows 10. I won’t steal his thunder by paraphrasing it all, but I wanted to draw your attention to a few apps you might consider installing, regardless of yours. relationship to the operating system Google. Some of them are Michael’s suggestions and others are the ones I stumbled upon.
Chrometana Pro and EdgeDeflector
You’ll want to use this combination of a Chrome extension and Windows 10 app to redirect your Start Menu searches to Google instead of Bing. (Nothing against Microsoft’s search engine; it’s just that we’ve always had the best Google experience, despite the colossal zero rewards for using it.)
Use the extension to redirect all Bing and Cortana searches to Google (in a browser). Then you can set EdgeDeflector to redirect Windows 10 every time it tries to open a website in Edge or Edge Chromium instead of Chrome. It actually denies these requests for what you have set as your default browser on Windows 10, so make sure you set that up correctly.
Finally, you can make sure to open Windows Search in EdgeDeflector and not in your browser. You should see a pop-up window the next time you click on a search result in the Start menu.
If you don’t want to redirect these searches in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, you want to use an extension named Foxtana Pro in a similar way instead of Chrometana Pro.
Twinkle Tray
It’s simple: install this little utility from the Windows Store and you can control the brightness level of any DDC / CI-compatible monitor right from the system tray icon. Never again have to fiddle with pesky monitor buttons.
TaskbarX
The second verse is just like the first: this app takes all left-aligned taskbar icons and centers them, and then you can make the entire taskbar transparent to give it a more Chrome OS look and feel. (And if that’s all you want with no centered icons, try TranslucentTB .)
Windows 10 Auto Dark Mode / Luna
Both of these applications basically do the same thing: they give you the (much-needed) ability to schedule light and dark mode times on your Windows 10. I suppose you can do that through the Task Scheduler as well, but that’s a lot more work.
WinDynamicDesktop
This useful utility borrows a page from macOS, not Chrome OS, to give you the ability to set dynamic wallpapers that change based on the time of day. Perhaps you want something darker in the morning and a lighter wallpaper at lunchtime. Whatever your preference, it never hurts to add a little extra noise to your Windows wallpaper.