The Secret Google Chrome Menus

Did you know about all these menus? 🤔

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
1:11 - Chrome Task Manager
1:49 - Interstitials
2:29 - Site-Engagement
2:55 - Omnibox
3:58 - Version (Variations)
4:44 - Version (Command Line)
6:25 - Net-Export
6:52 - Tracing
7:23 - USB-Internals
7:43 - User-Actions
8:11 - Edge-Only Menus

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[ennyy]

I actually had no idea about like 90% of these things! this is such a useful, cool, and entertaining video. Its kinda like your older videos, and I like that.

[ElMoonLite]

About the many AB-test Active Variations: as a developer I found over time a lot of AB tests are implemented, tested, and then one variation is picked as best for everyone. The thing is they are sometimes a lot of work to make, and also a lot of work to clean up the code for the unused variations. Product owners often don't like having developers spending time cleaning up and catching up with technical debt and rather have them working on new features. So you still have the same active variation selected for everyone so they go through the proper set of code, even though the other variation is never used and the test is long over. At some point you need to clean things up or risk development slowing down to a crawl managing all the variations, but likely there will always be some leftovers around. Bonus points if your organisation has little debt. Also, perhaps they keep some variations on purpose; some variations might benefit different users and you might be assigned a different variation based on your usage, that would be neat. Not sure if feasible though as that does mean maintaining more code variations and exponentially more complex interactions between variations.

[ThexBorg]

All these menus and telemetry collected are what Google want to harvest. They uniquely identify each user by their hardware configuration like USB ports. The user activity log is incredibly granular.

[paulfrayne]

This is the sort of video that sets you apart from the other YouTube creators, it's looking at fairly in-depth information on computer technology that can be useful to the super users and admins 👍

[norawaylet]

are we all just gonna ignore "github oogabooga" in Joe's search history

[fintomoon]

the USB tab may be useful if you are troubleshooting your chrome if it doesn't recognize your USB device. this feature is used to, for example, calibrate fingerprint sensor on pixel phones or to configure some of the keychron keyboards

[TheMAZZTer]

Chrome Task Manager is not hidden, it is accessible from the Chrome menu (under More tools) and the Chrome window's system menu (right click title bar or window thumbnail in taskbar).

Chrome Task Manager tries to take shared memory usage into account, something Windows Task Manager isn't designed to do.

Active variations is likely intended when submitting bugs so the Chrome team can reproduce your exact A/B testing configuration in case it is relevant.

USB device info is because there is a web API for interfacing with USB. These pages are likely intended to assist with debugging by both Chrome developers as well as web application developers.

[SlitDiver]

The timing one would be super useful for creating browser bots, because it looks like it gives you the actual name of the variable it calls when you click something. So if I wanted to create a bot that navigates to Twitter and tweets something, it would give me all the variables I'd need all in one go, plus the timing between button presses

[WheelerinMiami]

I never knew about these menu items. Thank you @ThioJoe.

[otter]

Chrome policy allows you to see what policies the organization your account is under has enabled or disabled, including a blacklist of urls (and some other fun stuff)

Chrome discards is one of my favorites because it lets me make sure it's disabled without closing the tab
(Not sure if that's what it's used for)
I also enjoy looking around chrome interstitials
(I found the chrome urls a long time ago and have been slowly exploring it so it's nice to see a list of what they are actually supposed to do)
Other ones I like:
Predictions

[anon_y_mousse]

FireFox also has embedded pages like this, but with about: instead of chrome:// and I'd love if you did a video on those and compared the different options available between the two.

[N....]

2:50 I thought this was more related to when sites are allowed to pop up that dialog asking you to pin their app as a shortcut in your OS and such, IIRC the APIs for that mention that the user has to have engaged with the site at least a certain amount

[Mokaphyyr]

That Dark Mode is going to help me out So much Thank you!

[Jacold]

Yeah, flags was amazing when CSS3 came out - early access was hidden under "experimental spreadsheet features" which unlocked amazing features like backdrop filter.

[Stormtrooper]

Awesome vid! Would love to a see a version for Firefox next!

[_SJ]

1:07 "Gracefully reset" I like that

[FunctionGermany]

the usb devices page is probably for debugging the corresponding javascript API for talking to USB devices. it's not a widely used API right now but one example is the GrapheneOS web installer.

[nacklesk]

I love specific the number in the thumbnails all are!

[ajrfan]

1:18 it is now search+esc. Shift+esc now shows a prompt that the shortcut has changed.

[otter]

5:09 some organizations disable the flags url but could you just run it with the launch parameters to bypass that block?