Useful hidden chrome:// pages

Since I have a chromebook, I was browsing the list hidden internal pages over at chrome://about/ the other day to see if they had added any new ones. To my delight I found that they had - this post will be about the interesting ones.

Note: Some of the chrome:// pages mentioned will not be available in the desktop version of chrome.

Keyboard layout

Can't remember that keyboard shortcut? No problem - just visit chrome://keyboardoverlay/. This is the internal page that gets shown when you hit CTRL+ALT+/ in Chrome OS. It is even interactive, showing you the keyboard shortcuts associated with any combination of the Ctrl, Shift, and Alt keys on your keyboard.

Battery Information

Chrome OS keeps a log of your battery's percentage charge, and processor frequency data over at chrome://power/ - even when you don't have that tab open. It doesn't remember this data over a restart, though. You can show and hide 3 sections: Battery Charge, Idle State Data, and Frequency State Data.

The 'Battery Charge' section gives you a graph of how your battery discharged over time, obviously enough. It also shows you a graph of the charge / discharge rate in watts along with appropriate moving averages - useful if you are trying to save power on your chromebook and want to see if turning your wifi off extends your chromebook's life.

The 'Frequency State Data' section is not so useful (to me), but it shows the amount o f time your processor has spent running at different frequencies.

The graphs don't update live from what I can tell though, which would have been a nice feature to have.

Advanced Wifi Information

Chrome OS keeps some interesting information about the wifi networks that are in range and in your preferred list at (chrome://network/)[chrome://network/]. It displays the recent wifi related log entries, along with the MAC address, SSID, signal strength, security type, and more - useful if you want to debug your wifi connection.

Like chrome://power/, this page does not auto refresh either, but it does offer a convenient ?refresh= query string parameter to sutomatically refresh the page every so many seconds.

Other Pages Worthy of Note

THese other pages are also worth checking out, but didn't make it into the top 3:

• chrome://net-internals/ - Shows everything you every wanted to know abou tthe network interactions that are going under the hood, and probably a whole lot of extra information that you probably don't care about too....
• chrome://system/ - Holds a ton of informationo about your device, and the version of Chrom(ium) OS running.
• chrome://gpu/ - Tells you what Chrome (OS) is using your GPU for, and what patches it has applied due to bugs in your GPU.
• chrome://memory-redirect/ - Displays advanced memory information for each chrome process that is running.
• chrome://imageburner/ - Houses Chrome OSes revcovery media creator.

Conclusion

I have included the most interesting chrome:// pages in this post. Some of them are only available on Chrome OS. All pages were found using Chrome OS 38 beta. If you find any more that are worthy of note, please leave a comment below.