When it comes to Browsers, Google Chrome is undoubtedly one of the fastest and the best. However, there is a possibility and you might have realised it that after a certain period of time, the once lightening fast Chrome becomes dull and slow. You must have experienced your Chrome’s tabs slowing down, a plugin not loading or the browser simply crashing.
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There are several reasons for this such as unnecessary extensions, plugins and browsing data. However, the damage to your browser is reversible and requires you to follow few simple steps. Let’s find out what can be done to speed-up your browser again!
Table of Contents
DISABLING PLUGINS:
Plugins are installed to display and process special types of contents and might be useful for specific purposes. However, over a period of time, several plugins which are not needed get installed as well and reduce the speed of Chrome. Hence, these can be disabled to improve the speed of the browser and if needed, can be enabled again.
For disabling unwanted plugins, type about:plugins in the address bar of the browser. This will open a new window and you will see all the plugins installed on your computer. You are needed to click on the disable link to the left hand side of the plugin and this will disable the plugin which if needed can be enabled. However, you need to be careful as to which plugins are being disabled. For example, it is not advisable to disable Shockwave and Flash plugins as several sites which have Flash based contents require these plugins to run smoothly in your browser.
DISABLING EXTENSIONS:
Extensions are helpful utility applications which are installed to help you to run several additional features. However, there is a possibility that several unwanted extensions have got installed in your browser. Some of these are displayed in the form of icons on the browser’s address bar. To clear these extensions, you can right click on the icons and uninstall these extensions.
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However, several extensions do not display any icons and hence these are to be removed from the settings panel. For this, you need to again click on the 3 horizontal lines to the top right hand side of the browser and scroll down to ‘More tools’ which displays the extension option to the left, which needs to be clicked. You can also directly navigate to chrome://extensions/ From the tab which opens, you can uninstall or disable the extensions. To disable the extensions, you need to uncheck the boxes on the right hand side.
CLEARING CACHE AND BROWSING DATA:
While you browse the web, the browser starts storing cached data, history and URLs of the sites which you visited. The reason this data is stored is to load the websites faster using the locally stored caches. This however adversely affects the performance of the browser and slows it down. To improve the speed of Chrome, you have several options like clearing the entire browsing history and deleting specific data from the browsing history.
To clear the browsing history, you need to again scroll to ‘More tools’ and under it you need to click on ‘Clear browsing data’. You can even specify the time for which the data is to be deleted so that data only earlier to a specific time period is deleted. Similarly, you may choose to clear the entire browsing data.
However, if you want to simply remove selective websites from the history, click in the 3 horizontal bars and click on ‘History’. In the tab, you can select which items to be deleted and accordingly delete the history of unwanted items.
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GOOGLE’S SOFTWARE REMOVAL TOOL:
The new tool from Google helps remove unnecessary software from Chrome. It detects and uninstalls malware and spyware. This application can be downloaded from www.google.com/chrome/srt.
INSTALLATION OF MALWARE AND SPYWARE REMOVAL APPLICATIONS:
While anti-virus applications are effective in detecting and deleting anti-viruses, they are mostly ineffective when it comes to removal of malware and spyware. It is therefore advisable to install applications which can specifically identify and uninstall malware and spyware.
