Like the Join beta program on Google Play Store, chrome flags enable you to experience unreleased features. Enabling these settings has the potential to boost your browsing experience in Google Chrome. However, before you go to your browser settings and turn on these beta features, it is essential to understand the associated risks.
This blog will explore Chrome Flag settings in detail and discover some useful features you didn’t know about.
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What Are Chrome Flags?
Chrome flags are the unofficial features that Google is still testing, and these beta features are made public to use as Chrome Flag. In this way, Google can gain people’s feedback on the new features before it rolls it out. Therefore, if you want to experience the exciting Chrome features and settings, you can head enable these Chrome flags.
How To Enable Chrome Flags?
It is straightforward to enable Chrome flags; all you have to do is follow simple steps.
- Open Google Chrome.
- Enter chrome://flags in the address browser.
Now you will see a list of unreleased features you can activate to experience settings still in the beta phase.
Moreover, you can use chrome://flags in the address bar to head over to the Chrome Flags menu when you need to disable a Chrome Flag.
How To Open A Specific Chrome Flag?
If you have a specific Chrome flag in mind, you don’t need to browse through all the Chrome flags to find it. You can follow these simple steps to open the Chrome flag settings in mobile or PC.
- Open your Google Chrome.
- Type chrome://flags/#(name of the flag with words separated by a hyphen) in the address bar
For example, let’s say the chrome flag I want to search is “enable offline auto to reload visible only”. Therefore, I’ll replace the spaces in the flag name with a hyphen and add them after the hashtag.
The final Code will look like this:
chrome://flags/#enable-offline-auto-reload-visible-only
Chrome Flags For Developers
Chrome Flags experimental opens another gate for the developers to try out new command line features. The developers can run command line flags from their terminals directly. Therefore, you don’t need to open google chrome and browse through the flags to enable or deactivate a feature. You can simply type the code for it.
For e.g., below is the code for running Chrome Canary on Mac OS when the user has activated the Topics API and set the epoch length to 15 seconds:
/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary
–enable-features=BrowsingTopics:time_period_per_epoch/15s,PrivacySandboxAdsAPIsOverride,PrivacySandboxSettings3,OverridePrivacySandboxSettingsLocalTesting
Risks Associated With Chrome Flags
An important question that pops up in our minds when we use beta features is their safety. Is Chrome Flag safe to use?
Experimental features like Chrome Flags are still a work in progress and can sometimes contain bugs and cause inconvenience. However, they hardly cause a good amount of trouble. Moreover, they can be easily disabled by heading over to the Chrome Flags menu.
Chrome Flags have a different significance at work. Suppose your company has a strict data policy and doesn’t allow you to share any company data with an IT company like Google. As Chrome Flags are beta programs and the Google collects user data to improve the experience, you might get in trouble. Therefore, it is essential that you understand the risk associated with Chrome Flags.
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Top Chrome Flags To Check Out
Below are some exciting Chrome Flags Settings you can enable to experience exciting features that have yet to be released. However, if you encounter any inconvenience or issue while browsing, you know where to disable these chrome Flags. Here are some chrome flags to check out.
- Full URL display
- Lazy image loading
- QUIC Protocol
- Lazy image loading
- Reader Mode
- Show Autofill predictions
- Omnibox Bookmark Paths
- Parallel Downloading
- Tab freeze and discard
- Smooth Scrolling
- Force Dark Mode
- Live Caption
- GPU rasterisation
- Override software rendering list
- Touch UI Layout
- Show autofill predictions
- Parallel downloading
- Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents
These are some of the popular unreleased features that you can try out. Google is working on these features and will launch some soon. However, some Chrome Flags might be permanently removed if Google doesn’t get positive feedback during testing. These reasons make Chrome Flags temporary and ever-changing. Check out these chrome flags and give us feedback in the comment section.
