What Google Chrome flags are, and how to enable them to transform your browsing experience

Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers the world over today. One of the biggest reasons for it is the sheer number of intelligent features it offers to provide for a better, more personalised browsing experience.  

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While most of us are aware of these features, available through several plugins and extensions on the Chrome Store, Google goes a step further and includes the ability to try several experimental features as well, through ‘Flags.’ Intrigued? Read on. 

What are Flags on Chrome?

Flags can be thought of as a series of toggle switches that enable or disable hidden Chrome features. The fun part here is that many of these features are ideas that Google is toying with before integrating into a later release of Chrome. Features like picture-in-picture, Chrome clipboard, hardware-accelerated encode and decode, and more, could be enabled via Chrome flags long before the features were integrated into the desktop and mobile versions of Google Chrome. 

Flags are also useful for programmers and web developers who need more information or control over Google Chrome’s behaviour while they test various features of their code. 

A word of caution before we dive deeper into flags. These are experimental features that are not meant for regular use. Incorrectly set flags can wreak havoc with your data, change the way Chrome works for you, and affect your browsing experience. Flags are fun, but proceed with caution and be prepared to lose data and/or reset Chrome multiple times to fix things that you may have accidentally broken. 

How to enable or disable Chrome flags: 

1. Open Chrome 

2. Type ‘chrome://flags’ in the address bar and hit enter 

3. You are now in the interface for managing flags 

4. Click on enable to enable a flag, and disable to disable it 

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What you’re now looking at is a list of flags or features that can be enabled or disabled, and a search box for browsing through these flags. Flags marked as ‘default’ are not necessarily enabled or disabled, they’re just in their default state for your user profile. The default settings for another user might be different. Enable or disable default flags to confirm that they’re doing what you want them to do. 

Now that you know what flags are and how to enable and disable them, here are some interesting flags you can set in this version of Chrome. Again, please note that these flags can be removed or updated without warning. 

Interesting Chrome flags to try

1. Speed up your downloads 

Search for ‘Parallel downloading’ in the flags window and enable it. This feature will split your downloads into multiple smaller chunks and download each chunk simultaneously before combining them once downloaded. In many cases, downloading files as chunks is a lot faster than downloading a single, large file. 

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2. A more comfortable reading experience 

Enable ‘Reading mode’ for a more comfortable reading experience. Reading mode strips web pages of all unnecessary content, including ads, pop-ups, irrelevant links, persistent videos, and more. It cleans up the page and gives you, as far as possible, clean text and relevant images. This mode is great for reading as well as for printing content. 

3. More history states 

Enable ‘Back-forward cache’ to let Chrome store more website data in memory. This will consume more RAM, but will allow you to more quickly go back and forth between web pages. It’s a useful feature to enable when you’re doing research and need to spend time going back and forth between sites. 

4. Faster browsing 

Enabling ‘Zero-copy rasterizer’ in flags can speed up Chrome’s rendering performance by forcing Chrome to directly communicate with GPU memory. This sounds technical, but what’s essentially happening is that the communication delay between your CPU and GPU is reduced, allowing pages to render quicker. This can create problems such as visual artefacts so remember to disable this setting if you’re facing issues when browsing. 

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We’ll reiterate: use Chrome flags with caution. As long as you’re prepared for things to go wrong and don’t mind experimenting, Chrome flags are a fun and geeky way to experiment with your browsing experience and to tune it to your liking. Have fun, but make sure your data is properly backed up to avoid unnecessary headaches later.