Google Chrome has quite a lot of special URLs. Some of these are covered over at Lifehacker in their post on Chrome’s about pages, but the meta “about:” protocol isn’t the only one that Chrome uses.
Waha, a user on the chromeplugins.org site posted a much more complete list of URL schemes that Chrome uses. Waha was looking at the url_constants.cc source file, along with some other stuff, to work this list out.
I’ve ignored the virtually universal set of protocols that are in just about every browser: http, https, ftp, file, data, feed and javascript, and also the URLs that cannot be entered into the address bar (not using Chrome 5 on OS X Snow Leopard anyway).
Without further ado, here’s the list:
- about:blank – the empty page
- about:cache – disk and memory cache information
- about:net-internals – network information including Proxy, HostResolver, URLRequest, HTTPCache and SocketStream
- about:crash – the page shown when a tab process crashes
- about:credits – list of libraries and other code used in Chrome, with links
- about:hang – this seems to kill a tab for me (I haven’t linked for that reason – use at your own risk)
- about:memory – memory usage of the various processes
- about:shorthang – see about:hang above
- about:terms – Google Chrome Terms of Service
- about:inducebrowsercrashforrealz – not many lolz here
- chrome://extensions/ – installed extensions
- chrome://history/ – your browsing history
- chrome://newtab – the new tab page
- chrome://thumb/http://www.google.com/ – thumbnail for a page you’ve visited
- chrome://favicon/http://www.google.com/ – favicon for a page you’ve visited
- view-source:http://otaqui.com/blog/539/complete-list-of-special-google-chrome-urls – view the source of a web page
Henno
How could I register chrome:// as protocol so that I could make a shortcut on desktop to automatically launch chrome://newtab.
I want this because simply launching Chrome creates a separate window. I want that relaunching Chrome would create and give focus to new tab (I have a habit to automatically click an icon on Quick Launch to visit a web page)
So far I have http://www.google.com as the shortcut but I’d really like it to be the newtab page.
pete
Hi henno,
I’m assuming you’re using windows. I would assume that you can create any desktop shortcut / favourite you want, and then just edit the “URL” to be “chrome://newtab” instead of “http://google.com/” or whatever.
I couldn’t promise that it would work, but try the manual change and then see if when you double-click your OS asks you what to do with a URL with the protocol “chrome://”
Orlando
I know this is an old article, and maybe the wrong place to ask questions, but which of these commands controls how magnet links and what apps it opens? I told magnet links to do nothing on accident, and now need to change it. Using Ubuntu 10.10.
Stonecold
Wow. That about:inducebrowsercrashforrealz is hilarious! I can’t believe Google would put that in their browser! I’m going to see if I can convince my little brother to do that… for teh lulz of course!