Window Naming: Another browser productivity tool lands in Chrome OS Canary

The addition of Virtual Desks to the Chrome OS workspace has brought an entirely new level of functionality and productivity to the ecosystem. Users can keep their individual desks organized and curated and that can result in a massive boost to streamlining workflow. Building on this productive feature, Chrome will soon give users the ability to name individual Chrome windows on top of keeping separate, labeled desks.

Discovered by Chrome Story in the Canary build of Chrome for Desktop, the experimental flag is simply titles “Window Naming” and it does exactly what the name implies. When enabled, placing windows into overview mode will give users the option to name each window so that you can quickly navigate between each one with a quick glance at the windows’ respective titles. The flag appeared in Chrome OS canary about a week ago but a recent update has now activated the feature’s abilities. As you can see in the image below, I have a window titled “This is where work stuff goes.” So, if I have multiple instances of Chrome open, I can easily see that this is where I am currently managing stuff for Chrome Unboxed and not playing Super Hot on Stadia which is in another window.

While I don’t recommend moving your device to Canary just to try out a new feature, you can easily give this a try if you are on a Windows device by downloading the free-standing version of Chrome Canary for desktop. You can still use the Stable build for daily tasks while having Chrome Canary at the ready for experiments such as this. You can download Chrome Canary for Windows here. Once you have it installed, navigate to chrome://flags and search for “window naming” and enable the flag. You will be prompted to restart your browser and when it reboots, you should see the feature activated. You can alternatively navigate directly to the flag by dropping chrome://flags/#window-naming in the URL bar of Chrome Canary.

Once activated, you can right-click on the top border of any Chrome window and you should see “Name window…” and that’s exactly what you can do. For users that really need to micromanage workspaces and organize information, this will be an awesome addition to the Chrome and Chrome OS environments. On Windows, the window names should appear when you hover the Chrome icon on your taskbar or you will see them when switching between windows. On Chrome OS, pressing the overview key or using a three-finger swipe up on the trackpad will expose all open tasks and you will see the windows’ names above each instance of Chrome. This is a minor change but a powerful one when it comes to productivity. I suspect that we’ll see it move up the channels relatively quickly. We will update this article as soon as we see Window Naming headed to Stable. Stay tuned.