Chrome Extension of the Week: ChromeAccess

Posted 10/13/2010 at 8:00am | by David Murphy

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Google Chrome has a proverbial treasure chest of options hiding beneath its surface. But it’s not as if many of these configuration screens and information windows are just thrown out there on one of Chrome’s drop-down menus. No, Google makes its advanced users do things the hard way: Manually remembering and entering various about: strings into the browser’s address bar in order to access “the fancier stuff.”

At least, that was the case until the awesome extension ChromeAccess walked its way into our lives. Goodbye, typed commands; hello easy-to-access drop-down menu for all of Chrome’s secret innerworkings!

So what, exactly, does ChromeAccess cover? Quoth the developer:

· 'about:net-internals' gives an overview of network status and usage.

· 'about:memory' gives an overview of chrome memory usage, by tab and in total. It will also give data for other browsers if they are open.

· 'about:dns' lists stored dns data.

· 'about:plugin' lists all the plugins that chrome is using (such as Flash or QuickTime).

· 'about:cache' gives all the items in the browser cache.

· 'about:sync' gives bookmark sync data.

· 'about:histograms' gives low-level performance data (very technical).

· 'about:version' gives a detailed version page with the Chromium, WebKit and V8 builds currently being used and user agent info.

· 'about:credits' lists the (open-source) software and API's that Chrome uses and links to their respective websites.

· 'about:about' lists all of chrome's about pages.

· 'about:labs' allows you to enable/disable experimental features.

And there you have it. Would you rather remember those 11 different commands or navigate to them in but two clicks of a mouse? I’m voting the latter on this one, which is why ChromeAccess is one of my must-have browser add-ons for more adventurous and advanced users!

Download it here!

Maximum PC's David Murphy wishes there was an about:Google section for Chrome.  It would be nice to learn about the company... and maybe use about:hungry to order up some free lunch from one of its allegedly lovely cafeterias!