Chrome’s active extension icons in Omnibox annoyance – sathyasays.com
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Chrome’s active extension icons in Omnibox annoyance

 ·   ·  ☕ 2 min read  ·  ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat · 👀... views

I’m a huge fan of Chrome & pretty much loved whatever changes Chrome team have done to the browser since it’s inception. This change, however, is probably the first annoying thing that I’ve run into.

Few days ago, after the latest dev channel update, all the extension icons on went missing. I initially thought all my extensions got wiped out. However, after heading over to chrome://extensions I realized that the update had a new “Show button” feature next to the extensions list and they had been set to hide all :|

Chrome Extension SHow Button

Why was it set so, I don’t know. Even more annoying is that the favicons of all active extensions on a page will now be placed in the Omnibox. As a result? My omnibox looks like this:

Chrome Extension Omnibox

Click to view in full

Talk about useless clutter. I have filed a bug for the second behaviour, since I couldn’t find an existing bug which talks about this behaviour. Here’s a summary of the bug report:

Chrome Version : 21.0.1155.2

OS Version: 6.1 (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2)

URLs (if applicable) :

Other browsers tested:

Add OK or FAIL after other browsers where you have tested this issue:

Safari 5: N/A

Firefox 4.x: No

IE 7/8/9: N/A

What steps will reproduce the problem?

  1. Install extensions which are active on most pages(Ex: Lazarus, Buffer, RSS Extension, LastPass, ATD, Explain and Send screenshots
  1. Visit the website

What is the expected result?

Omnibox should be free of active extension icons

What happens instead?

Active Extension Icons clutter omnibox

Please provide any additional information below. Attach a screenshot if

possible.

IMO active omnibox icons do not offer much to a user; I don’t see why that’s required. Especially on sites where lots of extensions are installed.

Add to the mix the fact that userscripts with generic icons are also shown add to the clutter while adding no functionality.

https://i.imgur.com/x8hGz.png

My request is to remove the icons being shown in Omnibox. If not, have

a feature where I can hide the active extension icons; much like how “Show button” feature is present for extensions

https://i.imgur.com/MBF1a.png

UserAgentString: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1155.2 Safari/537.1

Consider starring the bug in case this behaviour annoys you.

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Sathyajith Bhat
WRITTEN BY
Sathyajith Bhat
Author, AWS Container Hero and DevOps Specialist

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