Too many extensions spoil the webpage, after all
Google Chrome has some of the best browser extensions to choose from, but sometimes, the very add-ons designed to make browsing convenient have the exact opposite effect. Tracker blockers can break sites like Twitter, some extensions force the mobile version of pages to load, and that’s not even mentioning security concerns that come with extensions being able to read site data. Disabling each extension manually, just to make a page work right, can be quite a chore. Thankfully, Google appears to be working on a one-click remedy for Chrome users.
Redditor and Android Police reader Leopeva64 reports on evidence pointing to Google developing a new menu for Chrome extensions with a quick toggle to turn them all off at once. New commits found on the Chromium Gerrit reveal the underlying code behind this change.
The new in-development toggle in the Chrome extensions drop-down
Usually, ad blockers and other powerful extensions suggest you reload web pages after enabling and disabling them. Some browsers refresh pages automatically if you fiddle with the extension settings, but we aren’t yet sure if Chrome will behave similarly, or force you to manually reload.
While this early code is in place, the implementation seen in Chrome Canary doesn’t work at present — the toggle turns on and off but doesn’t have any observable impact, and the list of extensions is clearly empty. However, once functional, the button could be a savior, helping disable extensions easily to aid in diagnosing issues, blocking potentially malicious extensions, and making payments safely.
In all fairness, Google isn’t doing something novel with Chrome here; Microsoft introduced a similar one-click feature for its Edge browser back in April 2022, called “Pause extensions on this site.” Google has yet to comment on the development of its iteration of this feature, so we can’t yet say when we’ll be able to try it out for ourselves on the stable version of the browser. Until then, just make sure you stay on top of updates and be sure to check out latest version of the world’s most popular browser — Chrome 109.
