Unless you are a Chromebook tinkerer or an administrator for managed devices, you might not know that Chrome has a large number of built-in shortcuts to access a variety of features right in the browser.
If you frequent this site, the one that may be most familiar is chrome://flags
. This, of course, opens the flag settings page where you can access experimental features and tweak your Chromebook or the Chrome browser if you happen to be using Window, MacOS, Linux or Android.
It looks a little something like this:
There are many of these shortcuts. Chrome://version
will show you your Chrome device or browser software info. On a Chromebook, chrome://system
will give you a snapshot of all the hardware info of your device as well as the Chrome OS build you are running.
For managed devices, those under an Enterprise license or educational domain, chrome://policy
will show you which policies are running on your device or browser. (it will show self-imposed policies on non-managed devices as well but that’s another article)
These policies are pushed by IT administrators from Google’s Admin Console and range from blocking specific URLs to enabling Google Cast and everything in between. Currently, the Admin Console and a few approved third party platforms are the only way to manage these policies.
That’s about to get a lot easier.
With Google’s major push to capture more of the Enterprise market, developers are busy creating new ways to make admin’s jobs a little easier and streamline the deployment of Chrome and Chrome devices in the workforce.
A new policy tool page is in the works in the Chromium repository. The page is exactly what you might expect. From the commit, it appears that authorized users will be able to navigate to chrome://policy-tool
for quick access to policy management without having to traverse the Admin Console.
The work on the new policy tool page began just yesterday so it may be some time before we see it implemented. I suspect we will be seeing more and more enterprise-focused changes to the Chrome environment as Google moves forward with their new Chrome Enterprise initiative.
Exciting times from Chrome and Chrome OS alike.
Source: Chromium Repository
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