Google Chrome VR: Users can now browse the entire internet in virtual reality

Some sites will look more interesting than others

Aatif Sulleyman

Wednesday 27 September 2017 10:09

A visitor tries a pair of VR glasses with a smartphone at the Google digital workshop stand at the Labour party Conference in Brighton, Britain, September 24, 2017

(REUTERS/Toby Melville)

Google Chrome now lets you browse the web in virtual reality.

The functionality exists for any website you visit through the browser, but only if you’re using your mobile phone.

The new feature has been expected for some time, though it’s likely to split opinion.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

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1/1111 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

There are a lot of Easter Eggs hidden in Chrome, and more and more are discovered each year. One of our favourites is the dinosaur game. The next time you fail to connect to the internet on Chrome, tap the spacebar. It’s also worth Googling “barrel roll”, “zerg rush”, “super mario bros” (and clicking the question mark graphic), “festivus”, “recursion”, “askew” and “atari breakout” (and then clicking Images).

If you tend to browse with a lot of tabs open at once, you can clear up the clutter by pinning the ones you’re least likely to close. Right-click them and select Pin Tab. They’ll automatically shrink and slide left.

You can save some battery life by sacrificing performance. In Settings, scroll down to the System section and uncheck the box reading Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed. We wouldn’t recommend having this feature enabled all the time, but it could come in handy if you’re nowhere near a charger.

There are loads of Chrome Extensions available, but one of the most useful is Google’s Data Saver. It compresses the pages you visit to reduce data usage and speed up loading times.

If you use multiple Google accounts, for work and for personal use, for instance, you can keep your bookmarks and browsing history for each account separate by creating individual profiles. Go to Settings, Manage People and Add Person. This is also handy for when you lend your computer to a friend, and you don’t want them to have access to your internet history.

Many users would prefer it if Chrome downloaded files straight to the desktop, but by default it sends them to your Downloads folder. You can change this by going to Settings, opening the Show Advanced Settings menu, clicking Downloads and choosing your preferred destination.

To see cookies and permissions for every site you visit, click the View Site Information symbol on the left-hand edge of the omnibar. It will also let you quickly control things like Popup and Location settings.

You can quickly find out which pages are using up the most memory and slowing down your browsing experience by opening the burger menu, going down to More Tools and opening the Chrome Task Manager.

When you’re online and need to do a quick sum, you don’t have to hunt down your computer calculator or whip out your phone. Just type it into the Chrome omnibar and hit Enter.

If there’s a certain set of pages you always open when you turn your computer on, you can get Chrome to open them automatically when you launch the browser. In Settings, click Set Pages in the On Startup section, and choose the ones you want.

You can search your gmail inbox directly from the omnibar by going to Settings, Manage Search Engines, scrolling to the bottom and pasting https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#apps/%s into the box on the right-hand side.

Some webpages will undoubtedly lend themselves to the VR experience better than others.

The VR version of a page that’s heavy on text, for instance, will be neither exciting or especially easy to scan quickly.

A webpage with a 360-degree video or game, on the other hand, could be much more compelling.

A lot of people still aren't entirely comfortable with strapping a large headset to their face either, and using a VR headset for too long has been known to cause sickness.

You have to be on Chrome 61 to access the feature, but even then you also need to have one of Google’s Daydream View headsets.

“So far this allows users to view and interact with any website in VR, follow links between pages, and move between 2D and immersive viewing for sites that support WebVR,” said Chromium evangelist François Beaufort.

“Users can give this a try today by navigating to any site in Chrome and then simply putting the phone into their Daydream View headset.

“This is just the beginning for web browsing in VR so stay tuned, there’s more to come!”

Google is also set to introduce a tool that lets you permanently mute websites that automatically play videos with sound in the near future.

You can, however, try it out in Chrome Canary, an experimental and unstable version of the browser, right now.

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