I use Google Chrome as my primary web browser, and not long ago I came across something I could do with Chrome that I thought was pretty cool. And sometimes even useful.

A little background first.

Practically since the beginning of time, computer users have known about the keyboard combination CTRL + ALT + Delete. If your computer has a problem, or a window freezes, or just about anything, that’s what you try (or used to try anyway). That 3-key combination had the nickname – it was called the “3 Finger Salute”. Usually, when you click CTRL + ALT + Delete, you then clicked on “Start Task Manager” to show a list of the processes running on the computer. You could find the one that froze up in that list, then click on it to close it so that you could use your computer again. It was just quicker than doing a full power down and starting up again (especially in the old days when computers would take forever to finish booting up).

What a lot of people don’t know is that you can get directly to the Windows Task Manager without doing the CTRL + ALT + Delete key combination. All you have to do is hit CTRL + Shift + Escape. And there it is, Windows Task Manager right in front of you immediately. Look at that, I just saved you that extra click and added years of productivity to your life.

Now, back to Google Chrome.

What most people don’t know is that Chrome has it’s OWN Task Manager. Try this out. Open Google Chrome, and open a few tabs to various websites. Now, hit Shift + Escape. You’ll see something like this:

It actually looks almost identical to the Windows Task Manager, but this one ONLY shows the various tabs, extensions and processes that are active inside of Chrome at the moment.

So if one particular tab is not working right (like when a web page freezes up) and you can’t close it, you can close it from this window. Or if you want to temporarily disable an extension, you can do that from here as well.  Just highlight the tab or extension, and click “End Process” – just like you would in Windows Task Manager.

And for those of you that really like to get geeky, you can choose any of those items in the list with a RIGHT click, and select other categories of more in-depth information about that particular tab or extension:

Chances are most users are not going to have a need to dig that deep into the recesses of Chrome to find out what the CSS cache is for a particular running extension. But should you ever have a need for that, it’s there, ready and waiting for you!