Did you know about all these menus? 🤔
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▼ 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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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.
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.
this is what truly scared me after seeing these menus for the first time, the ammount and accuracy they go for feels borderline sickening
Google is an advertising company whose aim is to Borg assimilate everything. They've been caught in the past collecting wi-fi SSIDs and user location information despite users opting out, so have proven they cannot be trusted. The Software Reporter Tool installed in secret by Chrome runs at scheduled times in the background even when Chrome isn't open, sometimes pegs the CPU and network at 100% and is completely undocumented. The only information we have about it comes from somebody who asked a Google employee on Twitter what it does and the reply was basically "It's legit, trust me bro!" It's not open source so people can only guess at how much it spies on user activity. Nobody should be using Chrome, I don't understand why IT people keep recommending it.
and most if not all are probably used for debugging. i could see at least half of the ones presented be helpful in debugging some very tough things. for example, if youre building a website that makes remote calls, you can see what activity happens if its not working as intended. If you have some weird thing happen on chrome, you can log yoru user actions to find out what triggers it, etc Im a software dev so use a lot of tools like this at work. However its more backend stuff. If i was a web dev/front end engineer on chrome i see these being insanely powerful tools
@@pvic6959 It's one step away from a keylogger. Some of this stuff should only be collected if a user deliberately opts in to enables a 'Telemetry Diagnosis' mode.
@@Microwave_Dave that is why you need to open the site and start it yourself
are we all just gonna ignore "github oogabooga" in Joe's search history
Lol
It is really cool
3:36 timestamp, on the bottom
It's a username of somebody on GitHub not that unusual.
It's a large language model web interface.
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.
I never knew about these menu items. Thank you @ThioJoe.
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
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.
about:about is one of the best names ever
cool
@@WohaoG an interesting thing is for all the browsers I have tried, you can do about:about and it will redirect you to the browsers equivalent menu for example doing it on brave will get you to brave://about/ (which brave:// is just equal to chrome://)
@@WohaoG lmao
The Book of Mozilla
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
This is the sort of video that sets you apart from the other KZhead creators, it's looking at fairly in-depth information on computer technology that can be useful to the super users and admins 👍
Awesome vid! Would love to a see a version for Firefox next!
That Dark Mode is going to help me out So much Thank you!
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.
There's a new entry there too called "Performance"
very informative
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
I love specific the number in the thumbnails all are!
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)
1:19 you can also open the task manager through the three-dot menu
This is awesome. thank you :)
Super ! Thank you !
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf ❤
Yeah, flags was amazing when CSS3 came out - early access was hidden under "experimental spreadsheet features" which unlocked amazing features like backdrop filter.
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'.
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
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!
accept light mode
@@WohaoG NO!!
@@WohaoG eye strain
1:07 "Gracefully reset" I like that
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.
Tracing is something you can use with your own program. Its useful for knowing what code is slow or causing issues
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.
It isn't widely used maybe because the standard isn't yet finalized. Yet it's still implemented in Chrome anyway. It isn't the first time Google does this sort of thing
The chrome task manager one is fire, and I already know the rest of the video will be too.
The best tech man!
that's why i like u always coming with new stuff (me)
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!
oh I already found this out on my own on a school chromebook haha. about time I see a video about it.
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
I ever heard someone comment: "Chrome: Windows just is bootloader." Now, i understand why.
1:18 it is now search+esc. Shift+esc now shows a prompt that the shortcut has changed.
Thanks
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
It also could be super useful for troubleshooting FIDO2/Webauthn security key issues, which might be of value for individuals or organizations that implement them for multifactor authentication or passwordless auth.
5:09 some organizations disable the flags url but could you just run it with the launch parameters to bypass that block?
Thanks ❤
Very interesting!
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 KZhead open i was able to figure out why it was doing that.
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..?
Interesting👍
btw on chromebooks if you press ctrl + alt + t, you can view "crosh"
Can you post a video on how to turn off iOS screen time using windows cmd please?
I actually knew about the urls, but I never took the time to explore all of them
same
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).
that chrome task manager is so useful, i have like 15 extensions
Auto-dark is amazingly useful. I'm just annoyed I put up with so much eyestrain before knowing about it.
I knew that long ago. Always liked the heap corruption crash
Incredible how the browser really spies on us. Thanks for showing these things
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"?
My internal social engineering and browser hijacking senses are tingling and I'm getting goosebumps.
I didn't know this, nice.
I knew this sinds i first used google and chrome but they are nice finds
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 :)
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. 😊
Wow, if you want to free up ram, you can do it in the discard menu!! I was looking for that months ago.
The task manager works too, to that point.
Can these be used on mobile
Yes ig I just checked site-engagement rn and it actually shows on mobile Chrome
probably not most of them
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
Nice
Thats cool
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
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
I remember getting the clock one because i set the year to 1980 and tried tweeting about it
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 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.
hey i found something deffrind in brave in the Version it shows the A/B test in text fourm
IMHO discards is very usefull especially for low on ram devices
please tell how to watch yt video in reverse ,by somehow messing around with javascript or some extension
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.
Next one should be about edge! 😊😊
Edge has mostly the same menus, but I included a list of edge exclusive menus near the end
@@ThioJoe thanks for the vid 🎉🎉🎉
Firefox also has about:about which is similar to this except it has a funny name
Ok, so perhaps there's a hidden menu option to stop something that many people are complaining about and Google refuses to address. A problem that hopefully others watching this video have seen, is that you have several Google Chrome windows open and each window may have 2 or more tabs (not sure if the number is actually relevant).... Let's say that you have 2 Chrome windows open and they are close to each other, slightly overlapping as well, you have other things on your screen so that you can just mouse over from window to window as needed. What happens with Chrome, very often, is that you just move your mouse and sometimes, the mouse just may go out of the current window for a moment and happen to just be over the 2nd Chrome windows.... sometimes that 2nd Windows will be popped into focus WITHOUT CLICKING THE MOUSE! If you then just try to click back to the 1st windows, since you were NOT selecting the 2nd window, when you click it, nothing happens! It does NOT take focus! To get Windows 1 back into focus, you have to actually then click on Window 2, THEN clicking 1 brings it back into focus. This is a huge pain in the butt, because of this forced focusing. I've researched this issue a lot and find many people complaining about it, wanting to know how to stop this action. GOOGLE HAS REMAINED QUIET!!! No "fix" has been provided! Also of note, this didn't happen before, until an update last here where this started to happen. For me, to avoid this annoying problem, I just started using Opera. Fortunately, so far, no issue there. So, by any chance, Bard or anyone, have been annoyed by this issue and perhaps found some "setting" that can be turned off? There was something about "focus" (I can't remember what that was at this point) but I do remember that it changed nothing. Ideas?
Respect
And 5M Likes and 5M Subs
I actually didn't know about some of these.
Huh I remember just randomly entering chrome links and wondered what it was for.
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.
I've used Chrome's task manager for a long time, and there's something that puzzle's me about it. Sometimes when I leave the browser open for long periods of time, and I compare the Chrome processes in it and the Windows Task Manager, there's stuff that doesn't add up. For example, over time the main browser process shows up as using a lot of memory in Chrome's task manager, but if I look at Windows', what should be process doesn't appear to be using nearly as much memory. I sort them by memory use. In Chrome, it shows up as using over 1 GB, while in Windows, the biggest process never exceeds 300 MB. Never been able to make sense of it.
Windows moved part of the process' memory into the pagefile. Windows task manager shows memory usage without counting swap, Chrome task manages shows usage with swap
In Edge, I strongly recommend disabling the "Show feature and workflow recommendations" flag to avoid annoying and intrusive warnings and recommendations from Microsoft 🤦♂
I'm new to this channel and a bit lost. Just where did you say the chart of the menus was?
In the top bar where you normally type in a website address, you would put in chrome://about
will any flags go to where it let's me turn off copilot on edge? Can't access plugins any longer
@ThioJoe , did you know that formatting something is dangerous, in advanced options it was possible to format your Hard disk.
0:03: YES I DO KNOW
I knew about this
When will be their's same video but for ms edge??
thanks man
when the firefox version coming out?
Maybe eventually
opera gx also has flags btw
yes i knew
How can we be sure that the extensions we using for chrome are safe ?
why enabling title bars and windows borders doesn't effect on chrome when its on black theme ?
Is this feature or similar available for nonchromium based browser(s)?
about:about to get most of the special pages in Firefox
Similar thing for firefox?
You need to keep in mind that chrome is the way to do anything on a Chromebooks, seeing the USB stuff is prob necessary
The USB one could be useful on Chromebooks.
I wish Chrome on Android had the capability for javascript and ad blocking plugins. As it is, I wish script blocking was easier. BTW: "url" is pronounced "earl."
I have seen the clock ahead/behind when my clock is way wrong