How To Enable Chrome’s New Extension Menu

If you read through my Lifehacker posts, you can figure out pretty quickly that I’m a fan of browser extensions. I have extensions for adding a dark mode to my browser, one of showing previews of sites so I don’t have to open a tab, and even a browser extension for helping me manage all those tabs that I do open.

As a result, I also have a ton of extension icons on my toolbar, so many that finding the one I’m looking for at the moment can sometimes be a bit complicated.

Google is currently working on a new Extension Menu that will declutter your toolbar by hiding all those extensions under a single menu icon. It’s available now as a Google Experiment.

To get it, type chrome://flags into the address bar of your browser and then press enter. When the Experiments page appears, type “Extensions toolbar” to pull up the toolbar option, and then select “Enabled” from the drop-down menu beside it.

I also recommend checking out some of the other Experiments available, there are some good ones.

Once you’ve enabled it, Chrome will prompt you to relaunch it for your changes to be enabled. When you do, all your extension will now be nested under a single puzzle-piece icon. Click that, and a drop-down will appear with all your extensions nested underneath.

As a nice added bonus, the new menu will also tell you which extensions have the ability to access data on the site you’re viewing. If you don’t like that a particular extension has access, you can nip that in the bud by clicking the three dots right beside that extension in the menu and restricting its abilities.

Comments


Leave a Reply