Chapter 2 Chrome Browser
A Chromebook is designed to primarily be an Internet browser. In other words, it mostly will only allow you to open up websites and navigate between them. Chromebooks use Chrome OS - this is like Windows on a Microsoft computer, Android on your phone, or OS X on your Apple computer. It is the main software that runs your computer.
But unlike “normal” computers Chrome OS basically only allows you to use an Internet browser. Chromebooks use Google Chrome, Google’s Internet browser. When you are using a Chromebook, almost all of the time you will be interacting with the world through Chrome. When you have opened up your Chromebook you will see something like this.
Chromebook opening screen
The first thing you notice is that there is nothing on the “Desktop” and that all the “apps” are linked to from the bottom of the screen. This is called the “shelf” on a Chromebook. All the apps are basically just links to websites. To open a new Chrome Browser you can either click on the Chrome icon in the lower left of the screen or you can hold down the Ctrl key and press the n key. We write this combination of keys as Ctrl+n. If you do that you’ll see a new Chrome browser pop up.
Chrome browser
Here you can navigate to new websites and do all the usual things. At the bottom of the page are websites you visit frequently. In Chrome if you press the little square box (or boxes) in the top right hand side it will either maximize the size of a browser to fill the whole screen, or shrink it enough that you can drag the browser around.
Chrome browser
Click that box until the browser doesn’t fill the whole window. You can then create a second browser window by again using the Ctrl+n command.
Multiple Chrome browsers
If you want to do more than one thing at once you can do it in multiple windows like this. But it is often easier to see what you are doing if you use tabs instead of windows. You can close one of the browser windows by clicking the X in the upper right hand corner or by holding down Ctrl and pressing w.
Closing a window
With only one browser window open you can then open a new tab by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the t key (we will call this Ctrl+t).
Opening a new tab
Now you can flip back and forth between tabs by clicking on the top of the tab in the browser. You can open more tabs by pressing Ctrl+t again. You can close them by pressing the x in the top right corner of the tab or pressing Ctrl+w.
Closing a tab
We’ll learn more about Chrome Apps later but for now if you press one of the other icons at the bottom of the screen then it will also open a Chrome window. The only difference is that it will go to a specific website for that icon. For example if you press the little blue paper icon you will open up a Google Doc.
Open a Google Doc
You can see that the Google Doc app is just another web browser but sent to a specific website - the website for Google Docs.
Google Docs website
Signing in to Chrome using your Gmail account automatically signs you in to all Google services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, and others. This is particularly useful since you don’t have to sign in to websites that use Google services when you go to them with your web browser. For example if you click on the Gmail icon - the envelope - on your shelf in the bottom left corner of the screen you’ll be taken to the Gmail website and then logged in to your account.
You are already logged into Gmail when you log into your Chromebook
If you open a second tab by again clicking the Google Docs icon on your shelf in the bottom left corner of your screen, you’ll have two tabs open. You can separate the two tabs into two different windows by clicking on the top part of the Google Docs tab and dragging the Google Docs tab away from the Gmail tab.
You can drag to separate tabs
You can also put two windows together into a single window with multiple tabs. To do this, click on the tab at the top of the Google Docs window and drag it until it is close to the tab for Gmail. When you let go both tabs will go together into a single window.
You can drag to combine tabs into a single window
Finally, if you want to keep track of websites you use frequently you can use bookmarking. You can “bookmark” pages that you visit regularly and Chrome will keep track of those websites for you. It’s especially helpful if you don’t want to type the full address of a webpage, visit a page frequently, or are afraid you will forget about a page you will need later. To bookmark a webpage in Chrome, simply click on the star in the address bar or pressCtrl+d on your keyboard. This will open the following window.
Bookmark Menu
If you click on “Done”, the bookmark will be saved to the Bookmarks bar. Next time you like to check the webpage you bookmarked without typing the address, you can click on the Chrome menu in the top-right corner, hover over Bookmarks, then click the bookmark you’d like to open.
Bookmarks
Those are the basics of how you manipulate windows and tabs in the Chrome browser. In the following lessons we’ll learn more about how you can use these windows to take advantage of the web through your Chromebook.