Today, I faced a strange issue with Google Chrome. During my English class, the browser decided to not play a video from BBC's "Learning English" page. This happened in 64-bit Windows 7 running 32-bit Google Chrome. Here is how I was able to solve the issue.
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Category: Google Chrome
Chrome becomes faster on Windows with Profile Guided Optimization
Google Chrome on Windows was criticized many times for its enormous RAM usage and crashes when there were a lot tabs open. Moreover Google never admitted the problem and continued to improve other aspects of the browser not taking into account the performance, and making only small changes and optimizations that weren't enough. However, with the recent releases of Chrome 53 for 64-bit Windows systems and Chrome 54 for 32-bit Windows, Google claims to have finally improved its performance significantly.
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Make screenshot of web page with device frame in Chrome
A lesser known feature of Google Chrome on Desktop operating systems is the ability to capture a screenshot of an opened page as if the screenshot taken was of the browser running on a mobile device. It can even add a frame around the screenshot so it looks like a realistic photo of a smartphone. Here is how it can be done.
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Find out Google Chrome version without checking for updates
Every time you open the Help - About page in Google Chrome, the browser starts updating itself. This is not convenient because you may be using your internet connection for something else at that time. It might be inconvenient if you only wanted to see the installed version but not update Chrome at that time. Here is a little trick which will allow you to bypass the update check.
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Disable Material Design in Google Chrome
Starting with version 52, Google Chrome is using the Material Design UI enabled by default. While some users like this change, other would like to disable it as they do not like the appearance at all. They want to revert it to the good old look of the browser. Here is how to do that.
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Save memory in Chrome by running tabs for same site in single process
The Google Chrome browser, which is the most popular web browser as of this writing, launches each tab in its own process by default. This improves the stability of the browser, but makes the browser consume a higher amount of memory. If you need to save RAM, there is an option to make the browser use a single chrome.exe process per website. Here is how to make it work.
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Chrome OS will get the ability to run Android apps from Google Play
Google has announced that in the near future Chrome OS will get support for Google Play. This means that the entire collection of Android apps will be accessible in Chrome OS. Google recommends developers to optimize their apps for Chromebook devices and its screens and hardware. The ability to install Android apps from Google Play will be disabled out the box. The user will need to turn on a special option in Chrome OS settings.
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Automatically mute inactive tabs in Google Chrome
When you are browsing the web, you may be opening multiple tabs and it is very annoying when a tab which is in the background starts playing audio suddenly without even it being focused. While you can either completely mute your system volume, it is not convenient to do so and unmute it every time you need to listen to something. While you can mute only the tab playing the audio, you still have to locate it and then mute it. A Chrome extension instead handles this automatically muting all background tabs and keeping the active tab's audio unmuted.
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Chrome 49 brings interesting user interface changes
If Google Chrome is your favorite browser, you might be interested in knowing that some minor, but useful changes will come to the stable channel of the browser. While playing with the beta version of Chrome, which is at version 49 as of this writing, we spotted these UI changes. Let's explore them.
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Google Chrome will get an improved Brotli compression algorithm
Today, developers from Google announced a new feature which has already arrived to the Canary channel of the Chrome browser. A new compression algorithm, called "Brotli", was added to the browser. It will work with HTTPS connections and will be much more efficient than existing compression features in Google Chrome.
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