Hack & Improve - Chrome, Firefox & Edge

There are thousands of secret settings and extensions that make your browser faster, safer and easier to use. Jonathan Parkyn reveals the best for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Internet Explorer.

On the surface, web browsers might seem like fairly simple programs. Unlike, say, a photo editing program, which may provide dozens of advanced tools for the clever manipulation of images, browsers only really do one thing: display web pages.

In actual fact, most web browsers are doing some pretty complicated things under the bonnet in order to load and display pages quickly and safely, without putting too much strain on your PC’s resources. Some browsers are better at this than others. But we’re not here to stoke the fires of yet another browser war – Microsoft, Google seem more than capable of that without our help, if recent boasts from Google and counter-boasts from Microsoft about their respective browsers are anything to go by.

Instead, we’re going to show you how to radically improve your web-browsing experience with a selection of tweaks and hacks designed to boost your browser’s speed, security and general usability – whichever one you use. Some of our hacks involve adding extensions that unlock brilliant new features, while others involve tweaking advanced settings that fix shortcomings or improve performance. Most browsers also include little-known ways to enable experimental new features and technologies. We’ll be showing you how to take advantage of all these and more.

So, whether you use Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Internet Explorer read on to find out how to make your browser brisker, safer and better than ever.

CHROME

1 Close tabs and windows faster