If you have been a Firefox fan for years, you probably are familiar with the famous about: pages of Firefox, which display some amazing inside the hood features of the browser. Google Chrome is the new hot favorite. And since, it looks like one step ahead from Firefox in every aspect, there are some secret and hidden about: pages (just like Firefox) in your Chrome too! Let’s take a look.
1. about:version
Displays the version number of your browser, along with the Webkit and the v8 Javascript Engine version. The user agent used by Google Chrome is also listed.
2. about:plugins
Displays a complete list of plugins available in Google Chrome like flash, RealPlayer etc.
3. about:cache
All the web pages you view via Chrome are cached in the memory. This in increases the loading time of web pages when you visit them again. The cache is an important treasure of information and media of all the pages you visited. Chrome doesn’t have an option for you to set it’s cache size, but if you’re on an old computer, using few MBs of RAM, it is recommended to empty this cache, every once in a while.
4. about:memory
This one is interesting. As the name suggests, this function should list all the memory which is being used by Chrome. But interestingly, along with that, this lists the memory which is being used by all the active web browsers (Firefox, opera etc.) along with that of Chrome’s.
5. about:stats
“Shhh! This page is secret” is the title of this page. And it displays a list of internal timers and counters of Google Chrome
6. about:histograms
Total geek stuff. If you don’t know a thing about coding and metrics, you can’t make a word out of it. This page displays a histogram of Chrome’s internal metrics. But, in a very un-formatted type.
7. about:dns
Displays Chrome’s pre-fetched DNS records for the frequently visited web pages (hostnames).
8. about:network
If you’re familiar with the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox, you could make sense out of this one. This page can be used for I/O tracking.
9. about:crash
Everyone hates crashes. But ever wondered, how can you manually crash a tab, just when you want? Just enter this in your address bar.
10. about:hang
Another tool in the devil’s toolkit. Does nothing productive, but is fun. Entering about:hang in your address bar would hang the current tab. What that exactly means is, the tab will no longer except any input, but will be still running.
