Chrome redesigns its settings page to prevent information overload

Today, upon visiting the chrome://settings page via the browser on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, you’re currently met with a flood of information for things you can tweak and manage to customize your experience. Unfortunately, clicking on a subsection in the left-hand navigation menu only jumps you to a new point down the list using anchor links. While it’s easy to see where you are at as the chosen segment will appear at the top of the page, there’s still a ton to look at below it.

A new Chrome developer flag first spotted by Chrome Story in the Chromium Repositories (accompanied by a demo video, which you can find below) simply titled ‘Settings Landing Page Redesign’ cleans up this problem, and once activated, will only show you the selected section of the settings menu when you click on a subsection in the left side!

Settings Landing Page Redesign

Changes the layout of the chrome://settings page to only show one section at a time. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS

#settings-landing-page-redesign

Once again, this is another one of those things that I find myself asking “why wasn’t this always a thing”, but simultaneously finding that I’m glad it’s now a reality. I would love to see this applied to the Chrome OS settings page as well, and I’m confident it will bleed over since we’ve seen in the past that the two sections were separated (after being unified for years), and often get the same treatment when something new and exciting happens.

The flag is now available on my Pixelbook Go in Chrome OS Canary, though admittedly, I haven’t tried on Windows or anywhere else as I run Chrome stable there. What else would you like to see Google do with the settings page? This has been on my wishlist for quite some time, and I honestly can’t think of anything else except for my intense desire for them to get rid of the blue and white color scheme.