Recently Google has released Chrome 87 with new features and performance and memory improvements. “Chrome Actions” is one such new feature that lets you do things right from the address bar without the need to visit the Privacy and Security Settings. Like Chrome 83, Google has decided to progressively roll out the feature including Tab Search, if you’ve not got the Actions feature and eager to test it out, you can enable and use the feature in Chrome stable right now, here is how.
Enable Chrome Actions feature in the Chrome browser
- Launch Chrome browser
- Visit chrome://flags page
- Search for “Omnibox” and enable the following flags and restart the browser: “Omnibox suggestion button row” and “Omnibox Pedal Suggestions”
- Try out the following.
For instance, typing the “delete history” in the address bar shows the “Clear browsing data” command, clicking it will open the Clear browsing data dialog.
Clear cache or wipe cookies also yield the same result.
Chrome Actions, examples to try out
- Clear browsing data – type ‘clear cache’ or ‘delete history’ or ‘wipe cookies’
- Update Chrome – type ‘update browser’ or ‘update Google Chrome’
- Open Incognito Window -type ‘incognito’ or ‘launch incognito mode’
- Manage Payment methods – type ‘update card info’ or ‘edit credit card’
- Manage Passwords – type ‘edit passwords’ or ‘update credentials’
- Translate page – type ‘translate this page’ or ‘translate this’
Will you be surprised Opera, Vivaldi, and Firefox have this Actions feature built-in with different names before the launch of Chrome Actions?
Yes, very true.
Vivaldi has Quick Commands, Opera has Instant Search and Firefox shows common solution buttons in the address bar. For instance, you can try ‘refresh Firefox’, ‘Firefox cache’, ‘update Firefox’.
You can find all examples to try out in the Firefox address bar here.
So, so-called Chrome Actions is not new and innovated by Google, this type of feature exists in other Web browsers also.
Bonus: You can search in open tabs in Chrome when you run Chrome with the following command line switch.
--enable-features=TabSearch
Whats’s your take on Chrome Actions? Have you liked it? Has the feature available to you? Let us know in the comments below
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