The Secret Google Chrome Menus 

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

This is awesome. thank you :)

Super ! Thank you !

very informative

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

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

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

I love specific the number in the thumbnails all are!

1:07 "Gracefully reset" I like that

Very interesting!

The best tech man!

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.

the chrome tracing can be done from the networking tab of the dev console. it basically records network activities and other stuff(though the networking tab can’t trace non website things)

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

that's why i like u always coming with new stuff (me)

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

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

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

Woah thank you so much for this! For one thing, I had no clue there was an easy way to restart Edge/Chrome, I thought you could just do that in Firefox.

oh I already found this out on my own on a school chromebook haha. about time I see a video about it.

Thanks ❤

Thanks

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.

The Task Manager shortcut Shift+Esc doesn't work on Mac and there doesn't seem to be an alternative combination. But you can still get to the Chrome Task Manager using the menu under the three dots, then 'More Tools' and then 'Task Manager'.

The chrome task manager one is fire, and I already know the rest of the video will be too.

I didn't know this, nice.

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

The USB one would be really good for Arduino troubleshooting and or robotic arms we had a bunch that used chrome and we had an able to flag for serial communication but sometimes it wasn't showing up. This would for sure be handy to check that

I ever heard someone comment: "Chrome: Windows just is bootloader." Now, i understand why.

1:19 you can also open the task manager through the three-dot menu

Interesting👍

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

cool i will check it out it seems cool also i love that google task manager already my pc is a good pc but it still lags when i have a game open and RU-vid open i was able to figure out why it was doing that.

Thats cool

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.

Nice

The site engagement is mostly for auto playing audio. The idea is that video sites have high engagement and so can autoplay with audio, but I'm not sure how well it works in reality. I think the major video sites might have hard coded exceptions

The auto dark mode could be a game changer! There’s a website we use at my job that has a very harsh white background, with no dark mode option. One of my coworkers said it contributes to her migraines. I’m going to try this out, and if it works on our site, I’ll pass this tip along to her!

Is there a way to Disable the A/B testing? I didn’t realize they did that, but it would explain some oddball issues I’ve seen where 1 in 400 people have a problem in Chrome. Thank you!

I knew this sinds i first used google and chrome but they are nice finds

Can these be used on mobile

Have you tested to see if User Actions will show obfuscated browser hijacks where it normally won't appear in other applications? Or even if someone is running a hidden copy of chromium adjacent to yours, will it show across the "copies"?

Tracing is something you can use with your own program. Its useful for knowing what code is slow or causing issues

Can you post a video on how to turn off iOS screen time using windows cmd please?

I knew that long ago. Always liked the heap corruption crash

I actually knew about the urls, but I never took the time to explore all of them

My internal social engineering and browser hijacking senses are tingling and I'm getting goosebumps.

Auto-dark is amazingly useful. I'm just annoyed I put up with so much eyestrain before knowing about it.

5:22 I have that enabled with selective inversion of none images cus when it's on enable it inverts colors so I see white instead of black

will any flags go to where it let's me turn off copilot on edge? Can't access plugins any longer

The 'Your clock is ahead/behind' is a legit warning that I've had. I recently acquired a server, and had to reinstall Windows on it. Went onto Chrome, and that warning popped up (my date/time was 5 years behind). Took me ages to fix it, and I'm not entirely sure why it matters. Maybe it's to sync with the Chrome servers..?

that chrome task manager is so useful, i have like 15 extensions

hey i found something deffrind in brave in the Version it shows the A/B test in text fourm

thanks man

please tell how to watch yt video in reverse ,by somehow messing around with javascript or some extension

When will be their's same video but for ms edge??

Wow, if you want to free up ram, you can do it in the discard menu!! I was looking for that months ago.

How I disallow notifications from a specific site? Chrome only allows you to turn off all notification. Also you cant set it to always accept cookies or not), always block notifications. Always accept the data usage or privacy, or nor. This could be pretty handy to keep answering those questions for each site that you visit.

google keep & also chat GPT had a bonus value of "5" for me, no idea why :)

I'm new to this channel and a bit lost. Just where did you say the chart of the menus was?

I've seen the "clock one" -Can't remember if it was Firefox or Brave though... As far as I remember it coincided with some internet connection issues (my own fault).

Incredible how the browser really spies on us. Thanks for showing these things

Hey since you are interested in Google Chrome, Can you tell me w way to enable Literal Windows Like "Dark Mode" (not through flags, extensions those do bad job) on Linux. There's no dark mode officially 😢 Usage of flags make everything Dark and to my surprise it leaves out some in-browser lebals (like when you Right click and that 3-dot menu it remain white) Basically that dark mode doesn't makes sense And when its on then too the websites dont know that I'm using Dark or Light just like windows they do ;( Ps : there's dark mode on firefox, edge but that too don't work that properly on linux

btw on chromebooks if you press ctrl + alt + t, you can view "crosh"

the clock ahead and behind warnings i have seen but only on a old laptop that can barely run google chrome and is using windows xp shortly after they dropped support for it i did this several years ago and i could not get the laptop to have the correct time by automatically syncing it with the internet so chrome would not load any website until i manually fixed the time but again this was on a very old laptop

I knew about this

I remember getting the clock one because i set the year to 1980 and tried tweeting about it

Next one should be about edge! 😊😊

I believe I actually got a Clock Ahead error when I tried to access a certain website from Chrome on a Windows XP VM... The version of Chrome was out of date of course.

Are these menus available in opera browser?

Firefox also has about:about which is similar to this except it has a funny name

why enabling title bars and windows borders doesn't effect on chrome when its on black theme ?

How can we be sure that the extensions we using for chrome are safe ?

Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf ❤

Hay thio, hope your doing well? Can you do a video about a browser that runs a secure script and what it does how secure it is thanks. 😊

when the firefox version coming out?

I actually didn't know about some of these.

How does one delete the site engagement score information? That seems like a security risk.

Respect

ive known about those for 2 years now, and i thought it was hilarious pulling up random websites that literally operate the browser i was using. when people saw, they got very confused.

Similar thing for firefox?

wait you never encounter "clock is behind"?? did you never changed the CMOS battery? if the CMOS battery runs out, the computer cant keep track of time when its turned off. so windows then shows a backdated time. if you open browser than it will show you that error.

0:03: YES I DO KNOW

I have seen the clock ahead/behind when my clock is way wrong

Cool

Is this feature or similar available for nonchromium based browser(s)?

"inducebrowsercrashforrealz" 🤣

Is there a Firefox equivalent?

Hey ThioJoe i have a idea could you make a virus testing video

Clock ahead and behind is when you change your systems time, blocking you from using anything untill you set your time back to normal

I always see the time is behind screen when i’m setting up a vm

You need to make a video on the secret Firefox links as well... here are some that I like about:about about:mozilla about:processes (I use this one to free up ram) about:rights about:robots about:studies about:logo about:support Please make a video on Firefox soon!

Huh I remember just randomly entering chrome links and wondered what it was for.

IMHO discards is very usefull especially for low on ram devices

🙂☝🏻 I thank you