If you encounter a situation in which one of the tabs in Google Chrome is causing problems and is not closed, you do not have to close your browser to get rid of their problems. Chrome comes with its own Task Manager that shows you how much of the available resources are used by all open pages and used plug-ins. It also lets stop the process at any open tab without shutting down the browser.

1. While in Google Chrome, use the following keyboard shortcut: Shift+Esc.

2. The Task Manager will appear. Select the desired page that needs to be closed.

3. Click the End Process button.

Chrome is a multi-process browser. Yawn! What’s that? Simply, it means that each tab runs as a separate process asking for separate resources from the computer. The current working tab gets the most priority over the others. This was intentionally designed to make web apps run faster in Chrome. This feature makes the browser zippier and more stable even with multiple open tabs.

But if you aren’t a heavy user and use the browser to surf only a single site at a time then disabling multiple processes can free up some CPU resources. To handle each web process Chrome has three settings –

–process-per-tab
The default mode; each tab gets an independent process of its own. This increases the rendering of webpages and makes the browser stable as each tab is a separate process from the rest. But it also consumes memory.

–process-per-site
One process for each unique website; for instance a user with two tabs open for Gmail and another for MakeUseOf will have the two Google tabs running under the same process.

–single-process
The simplest mode; all tabs run in a single process, much like the other browsers we have now. This setting frees up memory for other applications. This is what we are looking for.

Create a shortcut for Chrome. Open the Properties tab. Edit the Target field as shown in the picture by appending –single-process to the path.

Similarly you can create two more shortcuts for the other two processes to handle your web sessions in three ways.

2. Manage tabs with the Task Manager

This is an offshoot of Google Chrome’s multi-process nature which allows each tab to run separate from the other. This allows us to manage, reload or shut down each tab without affecting the rest of our browsing. All this can be done through the Task Manager. Press Shift and Escape to start the task manager or right click on the blue top bar. An unresponsive tab can be shut down without bringing down the browser by a simple press of the End process button.

3. Some stats for nerds

There is a simple way to tell which browser is using the most resources on your computer. Chrome’s task manager lets you examine the memory use of the opened browsers on your computer irrespective of make. Open task manager and click on the ‘Stats for nerds’ link at the bottom. A new tab opens with detailed memory info for all running browsers. The second part of the page also describes Chrome’s process usage stats.

4. Some more stats on the Resources page

More for site administrators than for you and me but the resources page has a ton of info to offer. To track the resources used by a web page – right click inside the page. Select Inspect element – go to the Resources tab and reload the web page. You can view a list of images, scripts and objects from the web page and you can sort them by size or by loading time.

5. Drag to resize any text box

Do you feel that the size of a text box on any website is not worthy of your thoughts…then just place your mouse on the bottom right edge and drag to increase the size. Give MakeUseOf.com’s comment box the first drag.

6. Split Chrome into double-pane view

This bookmarklet from Chromeplugins.org is incredibly useful. The dual view feature is useful when you want to compare two websites or search results side by side. Drag the Chrome Split Browser bookmarklet into your bookmarks toolbar. When you click the bookmarklet, it asks you to choose the two websites you want and displays them in a double pane.

7. Startup with multiple pages

On launch, Chrome opens up with the ‘Most visited’ area. But it also lets us set options for starting the day by opening our most favored sites in several tabs at once. Click on the wrench icon (Customize and control Chrome) on the top right corner. Under Options – Basic tab we can add the pages we want to open on startup.

8. Drag and drop downloads from Chrome

After finishing a download, you can copy it to the desktop or to any other folder by a simple drag and drop directly from Google Chrome.

1 – Task Manager for Websites

Inside Google Chrome, press Shift+Escape and it will open up a ‘task manager’ with a list of all websites currently open inside Chrome.

This will give you an idea about how much physical memory is consumed by different websites and if any particular page is causing your system to crawl, you can do an “end process” to close that tab directly from Task Manager.

2 – Visual Browser History

This is a feature Chrome borrowed from Google Desktop / Google Web History. Type Ctrl+H to open your browser history and search for a term. In addition to matching pages, Google Chrome will also show you a small thumbnail image of that web pages in the history results. No need for any extensions.

3 – Super Clean Contextual Menus

I simply love this. You right click an hyperlink on a web page and you get only five relevant options to deal with that link. The number comes down to four when you right click any image in Chrome. There’s way too much clutter in Firefox menus.

4 – Search Websites from Address Bar

If you visit a website that includes site search (for instance: search.labnol.org) – Chrome will automatically recognize and add that search engine for you so the next time you can perform a search on that site via the Chrome address bar itself.

5 – See Memory used by Other Browsers

Open a new tab inside Chrome browser and type “about:memory” (without quotes) – somewhere at the top, you’ll see a list of browser processes that are currently running on your system and the amount of memory they are using.

6 – Reopen Mistakenly Closed Tabs

To re-open a closed tab in Google Chrome, just hit Ctrl+T and you’ll see an option that says “Recently closed tabs” – click the one you closed by accident.

7 – Launch Websites from Start Menu/Quick Launch Bar

Desktop shortcuts for web pages are possible with other browsers as well but Google Chrome make the whole flow very easy. Open any site and choose “Create application shortcut” from the File menu.

This will essentially create a desktop shortcut that looks something like this:

C:\Users\labnol\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
–app=http://www.labnol.org/

Clicking the shortcut will launch that web page in a new instance of Chrome that may not contain have any more new tabs.