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You might have come across some of the ‘about:’ pages of Google Chrome. Most of them are useful, one can crash your Chrome and one is just for fun. But they all are interesting to see. We’ve compiled a list of all the ‘about:’ pages in a visual tour for all our readers, along with details about each of them.
Warning: The ‘about:’ links in the details will only work in Chrome. We’re not to be held responsible for you trying it on other browsers and failing to achieve any benefit from that.
about:memory
about:memory shows you the memory usage of currently active browsers on your system. This includes IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Surprised ? So were we. You’ll be able to see the private, shared and total memory usage of every browser. Note that it wont show individual memory details of each process of any other browser but instead an aggregate. Similarly the private and mapped Virtual Memory usage is shown for each browser too. You’ll have to launch other browsers and then refresh about:memory to get the updated stats on memory.
The Processes shown are the Main browser, tabs, and plug-ins being used by Chrome. This can come in handy when you are trying to diagnose a memory leak or process hog, although we haven’t come across any so far in Chrome. The Task Manager ( keyboard shortcut : Shift + Escape ) also shows you the memory usage of each process and links to the about:memory page at the bottom called ‘Stats for nerds’.
about:stats
The about:stats will show you very detailed stats about the counters and timers of the different modules and processes working in Chrome. Although it’s not obvious, but you can click on the field names such as name, value,delta etc to sort that column. The information can also be filtered out to show only those items that match your query.
about:network
about:network is one of the pages that show real time data unlike the last two we’ve covered. Clicking on Start I/O tracking and opening a new website in a new tab will show you the details of the data being loaded. Similarly the performance tab will show you the time taken to read the page and load it along with a line graph.
about:internets
about:internets only works on Windows XP. It says don’t clog the tubes! in the title bar. Maybe they’re hinting at Youtube. The window shows a Windows 95 era screensaver with endless random tubes stretching everywhere.
about:histograms
about:histograms shows details about Google Chrome’s internal metrics
about:dns
about:dns shows the dns cache stats and the performance improvements it has brought. It also shows the future startup prefetch records for hostnames. It is not recommended to turn off dns prefetching in Chrome, as it helps in speeding up browsing.
about:cache
about:cache shows you a list of all the files stored in the cache. or you can enter view-cache: in any tab, and it will show you the list of files cached from all the websites open at that moment.
about:plugins
No surprises here, like in Safari, the about:plugins page shows you a list of all the plugins installed and their states whether they are enabled or not.
about:version
about:version will show you this page with the browser details and version information.
about:hang
about:hang will hang the current tab in which you type it. Not recommended unless you want to lose your work.
about:crash
about:crash will crash the current tab and show this message saying,
Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, press Reload or go to another page.
[via LifeHacker]
