10 Chrome Hacks for iOS and Android Everyone Should Know

You might think that Chrome for mobile is just a mini version of Google's desktop browser, designed for quickly browsing the web, while all your serious work can only happen on your computer. While Chrome for desktop will likely always be more capable, Chrome for mobile has its own share of powerful features that you should explore. Once you customize its cluttered home screen, you'll find a browser where organizing and pinning tabs is intuitive, blocking notifications is easy, and every website opens in dark mode.

Use pinned tabs to keep track of important pages

Option to pin tabs in overflow menu. Below: Pinned tabs section.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

On desktop, you might be used to pinning tabs to gain quick access to important pages. For example, I always keep Gmail and Trello pinned in my default browser. This keeps the bookmarks bar and bookmark folders free for link organization. But Chrome for Android and iOS lacked this feature until fairly recently. If you didn't know you could do it, it might be time to start pinning tabs on your device, especially when it comes to tablets.

Pinning tabs in Chrome for mobile is slightly different than on desktop, though. After opening a page, you'll have to open the Tabs menu. Then, tap and hold on a page and tap the Pin Tab button. Pinned tabs show up in a special pill-shaped "Pinned Tabs" section at the bottom of the tab switcher. Tapping on one will instantly take you to the pinned page. One added advantage? When you close all tabs because of tab overload, pinned tabs won't disappear.

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Prevent tab overload by closing old inactive tabs

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Safari on iPhone automatically closes tabs that are older than 30 days. Chrome has something similar for Chrome for Android, but the feature on the iOS version is surprisingly limited.

By default, any tab that you don't use for 21 days automatically gets moved to "Inactive Tabs." You'll find this section at the top of the Tabs page. This means that when you open the main Tabs screen, you'll only see tabs that you've used recently. But just because the inactive tabs are tucked away, that doesn't mean they're gone. If you have hundreds of inactive tabs cluttering things up, it's time to close them manually. Go to the Inactive Tabs section, tap the Close all inactive tabs button, and confirm from the popup. Every time the list gets a bit too crowded, go in and clear it out.

Android users, though, get a Safari-like option to automatically close any tabs that haven't been active for over three months (iOS users don't have this option yet). Go to Settings > Tabs and tab groups > Move to inactive session and make sure that the Automatically close inactive items feature is enabled.

Move Chrome's address bar to the bottom

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Speaking of Safari-like features, Chrome now has an option to move the address bar to the bottom of the screen on both Android and iPhone. This is great news for anyone who uses a giant phone like I do. (Why Google doesn't just switch this to the default, I will never know.) To move the address bar to the bottom, simply tap and hold on the address bar, then tap the Move address bar to bottom button. Going forward, there will be no need to stretch your fingers just to switch to another website.

Use "Send to Your Devices" to open your mobile links on desktop

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If you use Chrome on both mobile and desktop, you can use a little-known feature to send any link from your phone to the Chrome desktop app. On your smartphone, tap the Share button and choose the Send to Your Devices option. From the list, select the Chrome browser where you want to send it to, and tap the Send to your device button. The next time you open Chrome, you'll see a popup saying that a page was shared from one of the devices. Click on Open in new tab to resume reading or working on the website on your computer.

Block websites from spamming you with notifications (Android only)

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Spammers love to abuse Chrome for Android's notification system. Every random website you visit wants to send you alerts, and if you tap “Allow” even once, you're inundated with dozens of notifications a day. Luckily, Chrome has an option that blocks all sites from even presenting a popup for enabling notifications. Go to Settings > Site settings > Notifications and switch to Don't allow sites to send notifications. Websites won't be allowed to ask you for notification access, and they won't be able to send you notifications either. If you want to keep the feature enabled, you can also disable notifications on a per-site basis from the section.

Set up your phone so Picture-in-Picture works on any website

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Picture-in-picture isn't just for YouTube and media apps. Chrome also supports this feature natively on both Android and iOS. This means you can tune in to any website's video, and watch it in a little floating window no mat