On Spot Techs

By Eric Geier (Our Founder & Owner)

Originally published by Cox Media Group on 2/8/21

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If you use Google Chrome as your web browser or are thinking about it, here are some tips:

 

Change your homepage: Although Google is in the title of the program, you can have any webpage or search engine as your homepage, which is simply the first page you see when you open the web browser.

If you want to change the homepage, click the menu button in the upperright (the three vertical dots), select Settings, and scroll down to the On startup section. You can click Open a specific page or set of pages and specify what webpage(s) you want to come up when you open the web browser.

Alternatively, you can select Continue where you left off to re-open the exact websites you had open the last time you closed Chrome.

Change your search provider: If you’re wanting to utilize another search engine other than Google, you can do that with Chrome, but you should change the search provider in addition to the homepage. That way if you type a search into the top address bar, it doesn’t use Google but uses your preferred search engine.

If you want to change the search provider, click the menu button in the upper-right (the three vertical dots), select Settings, and scroll down to the Search engine section.

There you can select from the other major sites: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, and Ecosia.

Review or disable notifications: In the past few years, the modern web browsers have added a sneaky feature called notifications.

Although it could be useful, most find them annoying and is just another way for websites and companies to push advertisements to you.

When you visit websites, many will ask if you want to allow notifications from them. If you allow that, the website can then push a notification in the bottomright corner of Chrome at any time, even if you’re not on that website.

If you’re getting these notifications and want to stop them, here’s how: Click the menu button in the upper-right (the three vertical dots), select Settings, scroll down to the Privacy and security section, click Site Settings, and under Permissions click Notifications.

There you see a list of websites you’ve blocked and allowed. The first five or so entries on the Allow list should be from Google and those generally don’t cause any annoyances. But if you have some below there and don’t want to be bothered by them, click the three vertical dot button to the right of them and select Block. Do that for each website so they move up to the Block list.

Lastly, so you’re not bothered by more websites asking for you to allow the notifications, click the top setting Sites can ask to send notifications, so it’s in the left or off position and grayed out.

Sync Chrome with Google: Even if you aren’t using Google as your search engine, I suggest utilizing the synchronization feature of Chrome. If you have multiple computers, a smartphone, or tablet, you have access to the same bookmarks/favorites and other saved data (like saved passwords and autofill info) across all devices.

Even if you just have a single computer, syncing can help later if your computer crashes or you get another.

You’d simply sign into your Google account on a blank profile of Chrome and the syncing would download all your saved data.

If multiple people use the computer and prefer to have separate browser data (like bookmarks and saved passwords), first create separate Chrome profiles and you can setup sync independently for each profile.

To see the profiles, add profiles, or switch between them, click the profile photo icon in the upperright corner of Chrome (just to the left of the threedot menu button).

If you’d like to check your sync settings for whatever Chrome profile you’re on, click the menu button in the upper-right (the three vertical dots), select Settings, and check out the You and Google section right up top. If you’re logged into a Google account, you should see yo

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