Chrome's Special Features to Help You Browse Better on a Mobile Device

Chrome offers powerful capabilities to help make
browsing smoother on mobile devices. These tips below
should help you use the browser to the best effect.
Using swipe gestures
On the iPhone, iPad and on Android phones, Chrome
recognizes special swipe gestures that allow you to
easily move among open tabs. The gestures recognized
are different for different devices, though. On Android
phones, you simply need to flick your finger left or right
on the browser window to move among open tabs. On
Apple devices, you need to do the swiping at the edge
of the screen. Curiously, Google doesn't implement any
of these swipe gestures on Android tablets.
Switching among different tabs on Chrome is easy on all
phones
Tapping Chrome's tab button lets you view all your open
tabs at once. You can tap on any tab that you would like
to see and swipe any tab left or right to turn it off. The
menu button at the top right gives you the option to
close all open tabs at once.
Activate Smart Zoom with a double tap
Zooming in for a closer look at a webpage doesn't
require you to expand it with two fingers. Instead, you
simply need to double-tap it anywhere on the window.
Chrome does intelligent zooming, too. Whatever part of
the screen you wish to get a closer look at, double-
tapping on it centers the page at that point as Chrome
zooms in.
Unfortunately, double-tapping only works on sites that
are meant for desktop browsers. It doesn't work on
regular mobile websites. For those, you still need to use
pinching-to-zoom.
You can request the desktop version of any site
Many websites are programmed to serve different
versions, depending on the kind of device a user arrives
on. As convenient as this feature may be, it isn't always
appropriate. Many visitors need to simply be able to use
the general purpose website sometimes. Chrome allows
this - you simply need to click on the Menu button on
Chrome and ask to see the desktop version.
Preloading
Since data connections tend to be slower than Wi-Fi
connections, browsing on 3G or even 4G can be
somewhat unsatisfying, depending on the data speeds
that you have where you are. Chrome attempts to help
with this problem by offering a feature called Reduce
Data Usage. This feature compresses webpages as they
are sent to you.
Preloading, a feature that's only enabled by default for
Wi-Fi use, has Chrome preloading pages that it is
believes you will be interested in. For instance, if you
are reading a 3-page article, Chrome loads all the pages
to follow while you read the first one. Since the
preloading feature can download pages that you aren't
interested in, though, Google doesn't turn it on by
default for cellular data use. You can waste precious
data this way. You can turn it on manually, though.