Google Chrome

Google Chrome Tab Groups

Thanks to this great tip I’ve discovered the recently added Tab Groups functionality in Google Chrome browser. All you need to do is navigate to chrome://flags/ , search for “Tab Groups” feature, enable it, and restart your browser. Once that is done, right-click on any tab and you’ll see the option to “Add to new group”. Any tab that is already a part of the group, can be removed from there and added to any other existing group.

It is possible to rename groups and assign each one a color. In the screenshot above you can see how my groups look right now. Yellow ALT, red LM, blue PP, purple TTM, and green BLOG are tab groups. A color running under tabs to the right of each group indicates which tabs are part of the group to the left.

Grouped tabs are also a lot easier to move around and separate into a new browser window.

Chrome Extensions: PHP Console and JavaScript Errors Notifier

Here are a couple of handy Google Chrome extensions that I came across the other day.

PHP Console

PHP Console can display PHP errors and var dumps in the Google Chrome Developer Console and notification popups. It can also execute PHP code remotely, with the help of this server side library.

JavaScript Errors Notifier

JavaScript Errors Notifier lets you know of any JavaScript errors either with an icon highlight, or with a popup window. This makes things a lot easier to notice.

Why I’m done with Chrome

Mathew Green shares his reasons for leaving the Google Chrome development team. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s a quote from the “What’s changed?” part:

A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you. (However, and this is important: Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet. See further below.)

Your sole warning — in the event that you’re looking for it — is that your Google profile picture will appear in the upper-right hand corner of the browser window. I noticed mine the other day:

Clockwork – PHP developer tools integration for Google Chrome

Clockwork is a PHP library and a Google Chrome extension that work together to provide a new tab in the Google Chrome DevTools for PHP developers. The tab contains all sorts of useful information such as variable values, application tracing, timing, and more.

Google Chrome color profile

My good friend and colleague Michael Stepanov has been recently annoyed by some weird color offsets on his external screen in Fedora 26. Turns out, it wasn’t the external monitor, video card, or cable issue. The problem was with the new Google Chrome and its choice of the color profile. The solution was found in this Reddit thread:

Open new tab and type there chrome://flags

Find option “Force color profile” and set it to “sRGB”

Restart Chrome and enjoy blue as blue 🙂