Chrome 123’s cleaned up Side Panel is rolling out

If you are a user of the Chrome Side Panel on your Chromebook or other laptop, get ready for a change in how you manage that section of your browser. Rolling out now (I have it on a few devices and not yet on others), Google has removed the specific side panel button and opted to add shortcuts in the top bar to streamline how you interact with bookmarks, reading mode, and more.

In place of the old side panel button you’ll now have the option to pin or unpin your bookmarks, reading mode, reading list, and your history. Overall, I like the cleanliness of this and when it arrived months ago in Chrome 121 Beta, I liked it back then as well. Now that it’s here in full and rolling out to the Stable Channel of Chrome 123, I can see myself using these tools a bit more often.

How to add your shortcuts if they aren’t there yet

In the event that this update hits your browser soon and you are looking for those side panel sections that aren’t pinned up top, you can find each as follows:

• Bookmarks & Reading List: Use Chrome’s three-dot menu and navigate to Bookmarks and Lists and you’ll find Show all bookmarks and Reading list. Choose either and you can pin them once you have the side panel opened.
• History: Open the three-dot menu and head to History > Grouped history and you can pin from there.
• Reading Mode: Use Chrome’s three-dot menu and navigate to More tools > Reading Mode and you can pin it up top once you have the side panel opened.

This morning, I received an incremental update on my Chromebook and this change just appeared. This likely means Google is simply rolling this out in the background, so it should hit your device soon. If you haven’t seen the change yet, try restarting your browser. You can also manually turn this on by going to chrome://flags/#side-panel-pinning and simply enabling the flag there.